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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) April 13, 2023

SILVER SPRING—After disgraced former President Donald Trump’s first (and hardly rushed) indictment, this one at the hands of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (I posted the full indictment here, read for yourself), there have been and are many—oh, so many—takes being offered on television, in print, and on social media.

A few are pretty solid.

But many takes—oh, so many—are hyperbolically dramatic, breathlessly stupid, and/or wildly inaccurate.  Most of the worst takes are coming from the right: wild, irresponsible, and nonsensical accusations of political persecution and miscarriages of justice (some are comparing to the tale of the persecution of, wait for it… Jesus) or literally painting the picture with the exact opposite of what is true.

But there is some criticism that is more measured and nuanced, even partly coming from figures or outlets on the mainstream left or conservatives who have consistently opposed Trump, that “the Democrats” are bungling the timing and/or order of Trump’s prosecutions and this indictment may undermine the other cases arrayed against him, that this case is problematic and “the least significant” and “weakest” of the potential charges and prosecutions should not even be pursued (from The Washington Post Editorial Board!), that prosecutions should be withheld because of how Trump’s cultists might react (Bill Maher), that if this indictment is successful it will fool the left into prematurely thinking Trumpism has been defeated, that this opens a Pandora’s box and sets bad precedents as to how other former presidents and officials could be treated down the road.

Yet many these criticisms are incredibly dangerous and seriously undermine the rule of law and democracy in general, empowering illiberal fascist tendencies in our country that are already out of control and that mean that any major election could be our last free and fair election.

Unreasonable from the Right

The first type of commentary, coming from the right, is exceedingly easy to toss aside.

Firstly, pretty much that entire crowd was saying the same stuff before the indictment was unsealed; they had no ability before that to definitively assess the quality of evidence and charges and most are clearly making their mind up (or lying) based on personal partisan political allegiances, not the law or the facts of the case of which they are in large part ignorant, but there are already indications the evidence will be strong:  two people very close to Trump at the time of his crimes  in question—Trump personal “fixer” lawyer Michael Cohen (who blocked me years ago on Twitter when he was still on Trump’s side in response to my investigative pieces on his shady history operating in Trump’s orbit) and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg—have already been convicted in directly related successful prosecutions, with Cohen even robustly cooperating with Bragg’s office in its current case against Trump.  Furthermore, key figures deep inside Trumpworld besides Cohen, including Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, have been providing the testimony on which the Manhattan grand jury proceeded with its recommendations and Bragg decided to prosecute.

Secondly, events in question were late in the game in the 2016 presidential campaign but with extramarital affairs that happened years before the 2016 election (all the way back in 2006 and 2007!): that means there is a an overwhelming logical burden that would take extraordinary evidence to overcome to prove that paying off pornstar Stormy Daniels and with whom Donald Trump had an extramarital affair and taking other methods to quash another story about Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal with whom Trump also had an extramarital affair was not in large part done to prevent new stories of negative media coverage of Trump circulating in the months, days, and weeks before the incredibly close 2016 presidential election, one which Trump only narrowly won and with decisive outside interference from Putin’s Kremlin (which I have explained in detail before), so any idea that keeping these stories secret and using illegal accounting methods to keep this from having to be reported to federal election oversight authorities is patently absurd, full stop: there is no rational way to view any payments or efforts to bury these stories in 2016 a decade or nearly a decade after their occurrence not in large part as substantive efforts to aid the Trump presidential campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton.  Keeping such truthful scandalous stories about a candidate from appearing while voters are making up their minds and actually voting during early and absentee voting—regardless of any other reasons involved—is a massive boost to any campaign in any similar position, including Trump’s, and thus it is impossible to argue that the crimes of misreporting and concealing these financial moves are not directly related to clear violations of federal election law.

Think of it this way: imagine any candidate running for office engaging in illegal financial reporting to hide paying someone with whom that candidate has had an extramarital affair a decade ago and that this payment came at the height of that candidate’s political campaign, then consider the idea that the candidate would have done so at that time only for either or some combination of personal financial gain or to prevent personal damage to the candidate’s family to the exclusion of any political considerations… that second thought is simply nonsensical.  An attempt to argue it was not designed at least in part to benefit the candidate politically is an impossible sell, then, given that even the most inexperienced consultants or students of politics would be well-aware of the political benefits of such an act and would have to know engaging in such behavior would bring about considerable political benefits to any American political campaign.  Unlike other cases, here the intent-as-a-basis-for-arguing-innocence argument falls short in the realm of believability (as oppose to, say, considering Hillary Clinton’s e-mail/server woes under the Espionage Act).  And, all things being equal, again, the 2016 election was so razor-thin-close that any significant alteration of its equation against Trump would have seen Clinton triumphant; thus, it is far from unreasonable to argue that one or more of these stories about Trump’s extramarital affairs breaking late in the 2016 election cycle could have swung the election to his opponent and thus spared the nation the insanity of Trump’s four years as president.

Less Hysterical, Still Wrong

The other type of commentary generally critiques the strategy or risks of the indictment, but these arguments are also logically well into absurdist territory.

We have one case now unfolding from the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, and another that has yet to drop an indictment from Fulton County, Georgia, from its elected Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis, one concerning efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results.  A third investigation into Trump personally for his crimes related to Trump’s (ongoing!) insurrection campaign, his willful theft of classified materials, and his obstruction of justice in relation to returning them and to the relevant investigations is being handled by an apolitical Department of Justice appointee, Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has experience prosecuting war criminals at The Hague.  A fourth $250 million civil case is targeting the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump, one conducted by elected Democratic New York State Attorney General Laetitia James (and for which even just today, Trump had to sit for some seven hours of deposition).  There is also a civil rape case in New York involving Trump that is set to go to trial and a related defamation case, both brought by his accuser E. Jean Carroll.

While three of the four government officials leading the government cases are elected as Democrats and the fourth is appointed by the Democratic Biden Administration’s appointed and U.S.-Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is horribly misleading to portray their investigations somehow as being carried out by or at the behest of Democratic Party, including the Democratic National Committee (DNC), elected Democratic legislators in Congress, or any political wing of the Democratic Party, let alone liberal media or political organizations.  These are four separate investigations being carried out by two top local law enforcement officials (from Manhattan, a borough of New York City, and Fulton County in Georgia), one top state official for New York State, and one federal Special Counsel appointed by the U.S. Attorney General, and they are making their own separate decisions.  While there may be some areas where there is overlap between the Manhattan and New York State probes into Trump Organization finances and between the Fulton County and Special Counsel probes as far as Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, the idea that they are coordinating between themselves or with Democratic Party organizations for political framing or advantage as to what, how, when, and if they will prosecute is not only entirely speculative and wholly without evidence, it goes contrary to how these things have worked over recent decades in the American justice system.  While, as noted, there are certain overlapping areas of focus where different government prosecutorial offices might exchange notes or potential conflicts, anything beyond that, especially the idea that these prosecutors are working with Democratic Party leaders in Congress, with the White House, with state legislatures, with left-leaning or leftist media outlets and figures, or with national, state, or local Democratic Party organizations at all, let alone in concert for some sort of political strategy for the coming elections, goes contrary to how these investigations have operated by and large for decades.

(As an aside, let’s contrast this against zealous Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s 1990s investigations of the Clintons when they were in the White House.  It is because of Starr the that special counsel regulations were crafted to replace the independent counsel statute to avoid overreaching politicized witch-hunts like Starr’s, which proved none of the original alleged crimes for which it had begun but did uncover a salacious extramarital affair between then-President Bill Clinton and then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky, catching Clinton perjuring himself to cover up the affair, for which Clinton was impeached, a far lesser matter than the two Trump impeachments, in which some Republicans who were in office for Clinton’s impeachment had voted as representatives to impeach in 1998 or as senators to remove Clinton in 1999 but, tellingly, declined to vote to remove Trump from office as senators during his two far more serious Senate impeachment trials in 2020 and 2021; to add to the extreme irony, Starr himself was part of Trump’s defense team during his first Senate trial in 2020, further cementing who he really was to the public before he died in late 2022).

As opposed to Starr, we have nothing at all to suggest anything other than that Alvin Bragg simply finished his investigation and preparation first and, therefore, filed his indictment first: anyone suggesting otherwise, the burden of proof is on them and no proof has emerged.

So when people suggest that “the Democrats” are not putting their best foot forward by going with these charges first, they are grossly mischaracterizing how these things work in this country.  This is not some coordinated political campaign, and language suggesting that is deeply corrosive to the public’s trust in our institutions of justice, indeed, this destruction of faith in institutions is a lesser side of the coin that Republicans are explicitly screaming and that is one of the key hallmarks of its Trumpism as well as being a disturbing rising trend on the Bernie Sanders-left.  Just assuming bad faith and corruption without strong evidence to support that supposition—in such an unwarranted manner from the beginning before the processes even plays out—is dangerous, and can culminate in even far worse than what we saw on January 6 with the failed insurrection-coup attempt.

What people on the left and other principled Trump critics need to understand, then, is that when they criticize “the Democrats” for supposedly overplaying a political hand in reference to these separate investigations, they are adding fuel to the same fire of cynicism about our institutions that fuels Trumpism’s fascist populism.  The other officials will file their indictments if and when they are ready, but each case will rise of fall based on its own evidence and its own merits, regardless to what any of the other cases lead.  One or more cases may ultimately inform one or more of the others, but they are still their own cases and suggesting otherwise is detrimental to “the rule of law and not of men.”

And the issues surrounding Trump’s first indictment are “serious.”  Especially considering that all this is related to essentially cheating in the 2016 election, no one should view these charges as “weak” or “minor;” as I argued above, the political dimension is not “alleged” or a supposition: it is central to the financial crimes committed just before the 2016 election to suppress decade-old infidelities with a pornstar and a Playmate in a way that substantially politically benefitted the campaign of a candidate in Trump whose most loyal voters were Evangelical Christians (even more so than for George W. Bush, who was himself an Evangelical).

Republicans know this, so does Trump, and they are worried regardless of their gaslighting claiming the opposite.  Why else would drama-queen (this is objective, as he seems to have as his default tone “yell”) Trump devotee and powerful Republican Jim Jordan, preposterously the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, be trying to run unconstitutional interference from Congress already on Bragg’s case, for which Bragg has just sued Jordan, making it clear his Manhattan District Attorney’s office will not tolerate such brazen challenges to the rule of law (see the detailed 50-page filing submitted by Bragg: he brought receipts!)?  If it is no big deal, why not let a free airing of the evidence in the case prove Trump’s innocence, as a failure to convict would surely help Trump?  The answer is fear that the case may actually turn out to be strong.

As to the order of the charges, why not begin with the earliest of Trump’s crimes?  Yale professor, lawyer, and former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa adroitly points out that Trump’s crimes for which he has been indicted by the Manhattan DA are the first in a series of major crimes all related to skewing or overturning the outcomes of his elections, followed by accepting Russian malign assistance during the campaign, by his attempts to get Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to damage Joe Biden politically with a false pretense of an “investigation” in exchange for military aid that had already been approved by Congress (including the Javelin anti-tank missiles that have been so crucial for Ukraine in defeating Russia’s current military onslaught), and the whole series of efforts to overturn the 2020 election through actions such as attempting to pressure Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” Trump votes (see my interview with Sec. Raffensperger conducted just a few days before that “perfect phone call”) and fostering a violent coup-insurrection attempt against Congress, the peaceful transfer of power, and our constitutional order.  In pointing out the linked nature of these offenses and cases, Professor Rangappa obliterates both the argument against the timing of Bragg’s indictment and the idea that the crimes laid out by the indictment are minor, exaggerated, or not worth pursuing.

Rangappa also did an excellent job putting out the structure and merit of Bragg’s case in visual form, whether involving federal election violations or not:

In terms of thinking we should not pursue justice and uphold the law against a man who is wholly unrepentant, still pursuing his crimes, and is obviously still a clear and present danger to our democracy (as in, not behaving at all the way Richard Nixon did after he resigned), well, there is a word for using the threat of violence to affect a political outcome in this way, and that word is terrorism.

When it comes to the idea that choosing to prosecute Trump is opening a Pandora’s Box, I do not take this lightly at all and I have done my own detailed research on how political witch-hunt prosecutions in the ancient Roman Republic (including threatened against Julius Caesar himself) helped to launch a spiral of extreme partisanship that destroyed the Republic’s democracy and brought about the autocratic Roman Empire.  But it is not the choosing to prosecute Trump that is the problem: it is that Trump, unlike any predecessor, has committed such criminal activity outside the bounds of misguided policy and very much about his own personal self-centered conduct, that he is so unrepentant and continues to advertise he will further his crimes, that he makes not prosecuting him worse than prosecuting him as far as the consequences for our nation.

And the idea that Republicans might politically persecute Democrats mainly because of what Bragg and other prosecutors do now is farcical: since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Republicans have been abusing their power in pursuit of political witch-hunts for decades regardless of what investigations or prosecutions are being pursued now against Trump and are obviously already ready to abuse their power with enough numbers on their side in the way people strangely consider hypothetical or dependent on the Trump prosecutions…

Republicans Are the Actual Witch-Hunters

And let’s be honest and more detailed about the track record here:

• Republicans tried going after Bill Clinton for nearly purely partisan political reasons while he was in office and, again, found nothing related to the serious allegations against him.
• They “investigated” Hillary Clinton more intensely than Watergate for “Benghazi” (but really about her e-mails and server), but the nine Republican-driven/led investigations concerning her role in Benghazi were unable to uncover any serious wrongdoing by or fault with Clinton on Benghazi, while James Comey’s FBI correctly determined that Clinton’s issues around her e-mails and server did not warrant a criminal prosecution, however much Comey erred in other ways.
• Trump’s partisan attorney general, Bill Barr—as part of his interference and smearing of the Mueller probe and other legitimate probes into Trump—authorized another partisan in eventual Special Counsel John Durham to investigate the investigators of Trump, an investigation endlessly hyped by right-wing Trumpist media but that failed miserably: of three cases Durham brought, two went to trail with indictments accusing the defendants of lying to the FBI—one filed against Igor Danchenko, a source for the Steele dossier, and another filed against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who had been working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—both embarrassingly ending in unanimous acquittals by the juries and not convictions.  A third case resulted in a plea deal for an FBI lawyer at the time of the matters in question in which the lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to altering a single email related to the FISA court actions towards the Trump campaign staffer Carter Page (whose incredible sketchiness I have previously outlined); the federal judge overseeing the plea deal agreed with an earlier Justice Department Inspector General conclusion there was no political bias behind the actions of Clinesmith and believed Clinesmith’s assertion that he believed at the time that the information he inserted into the email was accurate and that he did not know it was erroneous, with the judge only sentencing Clinesmith to probation and no prison time.  Thus, over three cases involving one judge sentencing and two juries, the claims of a “deep state” bias against Trump and Republicans turned out to be nonexistent, yet Durham’s whimper of a probe lasted for close to four years and cost taxpayers $6.5 million by at least late December 2022; if there was such a conspiracy, Durham would have found it with that much time and effort and he most certainly did not.
• In contrast, Special Counsel Robert Mueller found a lot of damning evidence of collusion and achieved successful convictions or plea deals against thirty-four individuals and three companies with sentences including prison time for multiple targets of these cases; a referred case ended in an additional guilty plea deal for a thirty-fifth individual.
• Trump eventually pardoned three of the more high-profile individuals against whom Mueller earned convictions—Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort—as well as two less- prominent individuals Mueller had convicted—George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan—a clear assault on the rule of law in encouraging others to commit crimes on Trump’s behalf in exchange for presidential pardons.
• It needs to also be noted here also that throughout his time as would-be president, candidate, and would-be president again, Trump has repeatedly threatened or tried to use the government to persecute his political enemies beyond his and his people’s efforts to pressure Zelensky to “investigate” Biden, leading to Trump’s first impeachment.  Even now, he is atrociously calling for Alvin Bragg to be prosecuted for daring to indict him and is calling to “defund” the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice alongside other Republican allies of his.

Conclusion: Do Better, Media

One recent New York Times article proclaimed in its headline “Biden Has the Oval Office. But Trump Has Center Stage,” seemingly blithely unaware of its own leading role in creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of any kind of news coverage environment resembling its own proclamation.  Much of the mainstream press seems blithely unaware of the damage these narratives they are parroting may inflict (as it is wont to do), while Trump and his allies know how damaging these narratives can be and seek to inflict that damage to further their ends, regardless of the costs to our democracy.

The simple facts are these: before the indictment was unsealed, there was far too much mindless speculation about what would or would not be in it when we would clearly eventually know once it was unsealed and, before that, time could have been far-better spent on other topics; now, with the indictment released, there is far too much mindless speculation about the quality of the case and the evidence that has yet to be presented to the jury.  No one would sanely ask the jury to make a decision before seeing the full presentation of the prosecution and the defense, so no one should ask audiences to that now, just as they should not have speculated ad nauseum about an indictment before it became unsealed.  The press can and must do better, and it can start by not giving any more than just a little bit of airtime to these ludicrous and dangerous “hot takes,” if only to swat them down rather than to give them credence.  Then again, the press is already back to covering Trump’s plane on tarmacs and his motorcade, and, for much of 2022, the press was speculating about the 2024 presidential race, so expectations should not be high.

In the end, Bragg’s case may not be the strongest of all the cases arrayed against Trump, but that is not terribly important and Bragg has yet to fully play his hand.  When it does finally get presented, the evidence may very well still be damning and more than enough to erase any “reasonable doubt” as to the illegality of Trump’s financial shenanigans surrounding his hush money payments and their clear link to Trump’s political efforts to attain the presidency in 2016, and commentary that is prematurely dismissive of these realities or of the case’s potential should not be aired or taken seriously by anyone.  If somehow the case fails, that will not because of anything Trump partisans can know yet before the trial and presentation of evidence takes place, and that should be noted any time such partisan blind utterances are spewed.  Ultimately, given what we know so far and the arguments and context I have endorsed herein, when the wheels of justice are finally done turning in this case, it will likely not be a good result for Trump.

What is certain besides the premature nature of the bad arguments criticized herein is that interfering with and attacking valid legal proceedings undermine our democracy, the rule of law, and the principle of equality before the law, all consequences Trump and his Republican Party overall sadly find more than acceptable as part of their pursuit of power and furthering of their illiberal, fascist agenda.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) December 7, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I could write thousands of words on Elon’s rank hypocrisy, gaslighting, lying, extreme partisanship, and other mendacities—both before and after Twitter—but here I will let a picture do most of the talking:

The context?  “China and Ukraine” was trending on Twitter yesterday.  I, thinking maybe Chinese President Jinping and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had had some sort of chat, was curious, so I clicked on the trend.

And this is what I saw:

Not about Ukraine and China, the first result (and it was not a sponsored advertisement) was a post about Twitter and the decisions it took just before the 2020 U.S. presidential election regarding suppressing content that engaged in rampant speculation about Hunter Biden and what would supposedly be revealed about him and Joe Biden and their assumed “corruption” from a then-unverified trove of content (gigabytes’ worth of) from a “laptop” (or more likely a massive data posting or postings), the parties of which had access to it were keeping access closed and were only releasing unverified bits and pieces for the clear purpose of trying to generate damage against Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and to aid Donald Trump’s reelection.  There was smoke, but the idea that this was a serious fire was not accepted by multiple major media outlets (including the Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal).  If you think this resembles Russian cyberwarfare and media inanity against Hillary Clinton (her e-mails!) in 2016, you would be onto something…

A lot more can be said on all this and certainly should be.  But for now, it should be noted that the newly Manchild-in-Chief of Twitter, Elon Musk, was only too happy to work with writer (I would say former reporter turned polemicist) Matt Taibbi to release what the duo are calling “The Twitter Files.”  Musk did not choose a mainstream journalist with respect and credibility that runs deep across the political divide; he chose Taibbi, who has a record of extreme bias, slander, and smear when it comes to both the mainstream-Democratic Party-left in the U.S. and on the very obvious reality that there is a major relationship between Team Trump and Team Russia and has been for years (however you want to describe it in any legal sense), one that had a decisive effect on the 2016 election.  He and Musk amusingly claim their Twitter stunt is a real bombshell even though they are trying to rehash the same Hunter Biden stuff at issue late in the 2020 election cycle some two years later, still confusing and conflating the issues of highly speculative and likely specious reporting on Hunter’s personal information on one hand and whether or not those personal files (“the laptop”) embarrassing for Hunter Biden actually existed on the other (again, more on all this in the future).

But the bottom line here: I chose to look into a “China and Ukraine” Twitter trend, and, up at the top of the trend results, not a sponsored tweet, but at the very top of a trend on China and Ukraine was THAT story from my screenshot, a story by the Murdoch-owned New York Post (which exhibited less independence than The Wall Street Journal back in 2020 and led the Hunter Biden “laptop” story charge) about the Twitter decisions from 2020 related to the suppression of the anti-Hunter Biden campaign (even key figures at The New York Post thought that the story back in 2020 was weak and not publishable under actual, you know, journalistic standards).  Nothing about Ukraine or China appear in the Tweet text or the article preview.  But Elon wants you to see it, wanted me to see it, so damn what you or I actually clicked to see; Elon gets what he wants with his new toy.

On Elon Musk’s Twitter, when Elon wants to partner with a problematic “journalist” like Matt Taibbi—full of vitriol and hatred for mainstream Democrats—to do a selective hit-job on Hunter Biden and combine that with efforts to distort and reduce Twitter’s moderation efforts (from and still at a time when disinformation, violence, insurrection, and terrorism from the right dwarfs similar efforts on the left) to suit Musk’s own partisan politics, you can be sure that Musk will twist the platform to push his own pet project into your feed even if you search for different subjects.

This is not “free speech,” nor is it “freedom;” it is the effort of a billionaire malignant narcissist (who seems want to minify and excuse the transgressions of that other less-wealthy malignant narcissist) to hijack Twitter under the banner of those slogans but for his own unstated and nefarious aims, posing as a liberator but aiming for destruction, like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.  Under such gaslighting, Musk is happy to manipulate Twitter to amplify his favorites and punish those whom he dislikes, all happening silently behind the scenes, not in any kind of transparent way regardless of the meaningless, unsupported claims of Musk’s words of Tweets.  This is the truth of how Twitter is now, how it is after Musk took over with all the changes happening under his iron, merciless, take-no-prisoners rule as Twitter’s warlord. 

In the past, you might see a search result that returned results that were not what you wanted (maybe searching for TED gave you both Ted Lasso and Ted Cruz and you wanted a TED Talk…).  And, to be fair, Twitter has been somewhat broken since Elon sabotaged its workforce, with other nonsensical results happening when I use Twitter, but I have a very hard time believing that Musk’s preferred nonsense being force-fed to me on Twitter is accidental and not deliberate.

Having seen enough of Musk and his modus operandi, to me, this is clearly deliberate, agenda-driven manipulation stemming from the man who has made himself the absolute monarch of Twitter, without him telling us he was doing that, how, or why, while gaslighting us about transparency all the while (so who knows what tinkering might have happened between October 28—when Elon formally took over Twitter—and Election Day on November 8 to affect several close House races that came down to just a few thousand or even just hundreds of votes, that’s a whole other question that may never be answered, something that can and should be discussed later).

“Free speech” and “freedom” for Elon, but forced attendance in the court of the king for the rest of us.

Down with the monarchy.  Down with the king.

See Brian’s related article from December 18, 2019, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma and from December 26, 2020, The Nexus of American Right-Wing and Kremlin Disinformation Exposes Trump-Russia’s Mechanics, both of which are excerpted from Brian’s eBook described below.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) November 7, 2022 (with some minor grammatical/typographical/clarity fixes made November 9; would have been earlier, dear readers, but I am having my WORST case of the flu ever… get your shots!! *correction appended: this article originally misstated the year the last time midterm turnout was this high, 1912 instead of 1914)

SILVER SPRING—If polls were all we had to go by, I’d be far more worried about the current midterms culminating (more or less) tomorrow, Tuesday, Election Day.  But, my weary and worried Democrats and other defenders of constitutional freedom: I come with tidings of great joy!

Let’s Talk Polls

Over the summer, polls were trending in Democrats’ favor.  More recently, they have been trending in Republicans’ favor.  Given the fact that by multiple measures most Republican candidates at the national- and top-statewide-levels (or almost most) are now questioning or denying the outcome of the 2020 presidential election (or quietly accepting those who do) and are thus supporting Trump’s Big Lie fascist insurrection coup effort to destroy the Constitution, free-and-fair elections, and the rule of law as the transition from political party to personality cult continues—and that most of those so-called “election deniers” are expected to win—this understandably creates anxiety among not only Democrats, but also Republicans and independents who want America to continue as a true democracy that respects process and minority rights.  Collectively, the polls have gone down for Democrats in key races and have significantly lowered their chances of holding onto the House and Senate in the eyes of analysts and the predictive models they follow.  With democracy itself at stake—should Republicans be able to block most of Biden’s agenda while in charge of even just the House for the next two years and then, voters blaming Biden put Trump back in White House, we may see an end to free and fair federal elections in elections after—you could say it’s time for Democrats and others willing to defend the Constitution to panic.

To those who prioritize democracy over demagoguery, though, I bear the following message: take heart, and have hope, because polling data—while the most prominently utilized data in predictive election analysis—is not the only data, and it’s possible some of that other data in certain circumstances may actually trump (sorry, couldn’t resist) the polls, and specifically in the 2022 midterms.

How?  Polls are complicated: complicated to construct and complicated to interpret and judge, and even understanding what makes the best pollsters the best can be challenging.  Pollsters basically base what portions of their sample—you are not going to interview everyone, literally, but a far smaller group that you hope to draw conclusions from—and/or how they will weight/adjust them towards being more appropriately male, female, rural, urban, suburban, black, white, Hispanic, younger, older, educated, less educated, etc. on a number of factors, often involving a level of guesswork and highlighting balances that pollsters think will reflect turnout considered alongside the general demographics of the country or state (especially registered or likely voters) and/or the portions of groups present in previous electorates.  If they are not weighting on previous elections or the latest demographics and along census results from the American Community Survey, they may base on their own models or look at a range of models for the current election.

Furthermore, one would not include a large sample of Asian or Jewish voters in Idaho or Montana, but would include such in California or Florida, respectively.  Pollsters will often try to have the proportions approach similar types of recent elections and/or other recent election cycles.  For examples, midterm elections, presidential-year elections, primaries, special elections, and referenda all tend to have different demographic balances overall and there are also differences state to state, although turnout in this election is thus far breaking midterm records and thus calling into question how much previous midterms would be accurate predictors.

In addition, there is the margin of error: each poll has a +/- margin-of-error range, say, 3.5%, meaning that if, say, the numbers the polls give one candidate leading another are 51 to 48, both the 51% and the 48% could easily be 3.5% higher or lower; the margin of error says that, generally, with 95% confidence, the results will fall within that range.  For polls to be “off,” the final results would have to fall outside of that +/- range.  It is important to note that, given this, polls that show candidates are closer than the margin of error range should essentially be considered ties.

So what could throw polling off in an election?  If, for some reason, a certain demographic group or groups was or were either significantly overrepresented or underrepresented, something that would either significantly drive up turnout or lower turnout among one group or another.  Say, rural voters, or black voters, or… women.

See what I am getting at?

An Idea…

What I am saying for these 2022 midterms is that I am expecting there is a very good chance of a polling error missing democratic women voters’ surge inspired by the overturning of Roe v. Wade in a way that will mean victory for Democrats, who should overperform their polling predictions by at least several percentage points and therefore win most close races, that a new group of women who would otherwise not vote in a midterm will now vote (32% of eligible female voters did not vote in 2020, compared to 35% of male ones, though it should be noted that 2020 had the highest overall turnout since 1900).

Simple logic would dictate that, after the Supreme Court’s radical decision to overthrow a half-century of precedent (despite assurances hints from certain conservative justices that they would not) in the Dobbs case (and its ruling’s draft’s leak) that destroyed the constitutional protections afforded by the Roe v. Wade decision, you would see a lot more women turn out to vote than in a typical election.  And this thought gave me much hope, but it was basically on a wing and a prayer along with some solid logic, and that was all I had.

Until I found more data—hard­ data—that suggested the polls here are off and off because they are undercounting female votes.

…Consecrated into Form

Enough with the abstract, then; let’s get into the hard data that has since given concrete form to my abstract hopes and hunches!

When I was thinking about all this, I asked myself: when was one of the last times pollsters underestimated turnout among a particular demographic group that turned out in significantly higher portions and that this caused an upset-win for the side not favored in the polls?  In 2016, to name one example, with rural white voters turning out in very high numbers for Trump and their participation at that level was not anticipated by most pollsters, giving him his wins in three key swing states that were heavily favored for Clinton.

In related votes after Dobbs this year, there are multiple serious data points in actual electoral contests backing up my main thesis.   First, with the Kansas referendum on allowing a lift on current protections in the state constitution for abortion rights, there had been just one poll beforehand, predicting the vote to allow tampering with abortion rights would win by four points; it was voted down by 18 points, a 22-point swing against expectations and a triumph for abortion rights.

And there have been multiple special congressional elections since, with Democrats overperforming their expectations by an average of nine percentage-points across four special elections from June-August (in the one that resulted in a Democratic victory, in New York’s 19^th District, Democratic victor Pat Ryan focused on protecting abortion right as a top issue; and this leaves out a fifth special election, Alaska’s ranked-choice election, which a Democrat won and will be be discussed later).

Ok, but an abortion rights referenda and five congressional special elections are not the same as the midterms.  What could indicate more specifically that female turnout would be significantly higher in this midterm election than others and that pollsters would miss this, overrepresenting Republican voters in poll tallies and underrepresenting Democratic votes, particularly women?

As I noted, polling is generally based on tinkering around with normal turnouts or models for the current year.  In this case, looking at women in recent elections according to exit polls, they already generally turn out in slightly-higher numbers than men (across all major racial categories) and thus form more of the electorate, with pollsters already taking this into account.

Let’s look at a competitive swing state for this year’s midterms, Arizona.  In the 2018 midterms, women in Arizona were 53% of the electorate for the U.S. Senate race to 47% for men, and 52% to 48% for men in the 2020 presidential election.  One recent poll I saw in Arizona for this year’s midterms has the same portions as the last midterm there.  Other midterm polls in Arizona have proportional female-male sample-population breakdowns closer to the more recent presidential election, but all the Arizona polls I saw in which I could see the breakdowns reflected some sort of preexisting gender imbalance in favor of more women voting and close to the gender breakdowns of recent elections.

To pick another state, for midterms in Ohio in 2018, it was 51% women as voters in the U.S. Senate race there to 49% men and, for president there in 2020, it was 53% women as a share of voters to 47% men (here’s two polls I checked that are close to matching the latter and one that’s in between).  Try the same for more Arizona or Ohio polls, or especially other 2022 battleground states (I have), and you will mostly (perhaps always?) see the same.

Nationally, for both the presidency and the U.S. House in 2020, it was 52% women to 48% men as a share of the vote, the same for midterm House results nationally in 2018, the same for the presidential election in 2016 (current generic ballot national polls also show the same or a close gender gap in favor of women).

In general, even if there seems like there might be a slightly larger-than-average gender gap, I have seen these presented as unweighted (sometimes you just get more of respondents in a certain category randomly) and it isn’t clear that this gap was not mitigated by weighting.

Thus, most polls in the U.S. are now reflect something of that 53-51-percent-female to 47-49-percent-male breakdown in their samples and/or are adjusted by weighting to reflect this.  In other words, there is already a built-in “women vote in most elections more than men” factor with most polls and has been for some time.

This means that any new surge in women voting in this midterm—particularly women registering who are far more prone to be Democrats and/or young, which would far more predispose them to prefer laws/policies that allow women to decide their own bodily and reproductive autonomy without (or just minimal) government regulation—would be missed by the current crop of polls.

The next question I am pretty sure you have on your mind is—“Well, whatever Mr. Smarty-Pants Blah-Blah, do you have any actual data that there are far more women—specifically women who would lean pro-choice—registering to vote than men for this midterm now?”

The answer is “YES! Yes I DO!”

The Current Hard Data on Voters in the Current 2022 Midterms

For the following I must thank—of all outlets—Teen Vogue, specifically an article by Fortesa Latifi (if you doubt her awesomeness, just know that her Twitter background image is of Tony Soprano in his pool with his beloved ducks), who introduced me to the unique work of political data professional Tom Bonier (CEO of TargetSmart, a political data operation) and his New York Times op-ed.  Tom has been providing some invaluable takes on the current midterms and they bear much weight in supporting my thesis of a big polling miss.

Notably, he has been detecting huge rises in the portion of female voters registering to vote in the period since the Dobbs decision has been an issue.

Tom also compares this to 2020 election data, hardly a year where women were weak in turning out (they outvoted men by four points, 52% to 48%) and finds that in 2022, differences over the same period of time in 2020 were drastic, with far higher portions of women registering than in 2020 and with a significant portion of states in 2020 even having men outregister women.

Specifically, Bonier notes that for our current year they looked at 45 states and that in 41 of those 45 states, women increased their share of voter registration after Dobbs (and the four states that did not had automatic registration).  With its unique ballot measure on abortion, Kansas led the way, but also among the highest states were Alaska (which had just elected its first Democrat in a half-century—and first Native Alaskan—Mary Peltola, to the U.S. House and even over Sarah Palin, but just to finish the recently-deceased Republican representative’s term for a few months; she is up for reelection on Tuesday and looks to win again), and the three key swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Ohio.

You can see the breakdown from this recent September here:

If many of those look like huge gaps, it is because they are.

And for a relative sense of how big these are, here Tom provides the data at the same time from 2020:

Not only is the gender gap far larger in favor of females compared to 2020, but about one-third of states had a gap that favored men at the time.  Those gaps in favor of men have disappeared in 2020 except for literally three states, two of which (Georgia and Oregon) have automatic registration (and in Georgia, women were requesting more of a share of mail-in ballots than they did in 2020).

Bonier helpfully takes updated numbers (with even larger gaps) from October 2022 imposed on October 2020 numbers, and the differences are all the more striking:

And these gaps are not fading over time:

And if there is any doubt that the women forming the gap are overwhelming registering to preserve their rights to choose, to bodily autonomy, and to reproductive freedom, the same period shows not only major increases in Democratic share of registrations and major drops in share of registrations for Republicans but also a big bump in the portion of under-age-25 voters registering compared to the same period in 2020: in other words, young women are flocking to register to vote and to vote as Democrats relative to other elections.

In fact, in 31 out of the 45 states analyzed by Bonier in September, under-25s were increasing their vote share after Dobbs. And these are not polls that are estimates.  These are sets of hard voter registration data.

To quote Tom Bonier, “Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It.”   

Reinforcing Current Voter Data

There are other key sets of related statistics that only reinforce my thesis.

Early and absentee voter turnout overall and in many states are up significantly since the 2018 midterms: as of the tally for the end of Sunday (and this will update today), up over 8.2% and over three million votes in absolute terms (Republicans’ share of early voting is down from 2018), with nearly 3.1 million more Democrats having voted early in this midterm than in 2018 by the tally the Sunday before that midterm (you can find roughly similar differences in many other states, including key swing states like: Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—but North Carolina, for example, bucks that trend—just to name a few).

In the past few election cycles, the early game has heavily favored Democrats, most famously in 2020, so it is interesting to note that Democrats are improving on their best area.  But, you might ask, could that signify a weakening of their weakest spot: in-person voting on election day, an offset that might negate or surpass whatever proportional gains they are making in early/absentee voting?

Here’s where things get interesting: Pew, one of the most consistently reliable sources of polling research, notes that, compared to 2020, 14% more—34% vs 20% back in October 2020—Democrats polled in October indicated they would vote in person on Election Day, almost one-and-a-half times greater, compared to only a four-percent intended-increase on Election Day participation by Republicans (they were already high, at 50% in 2020).  It would be one thing if Democrats’ margins over early/mail voting Republicans were offset significantly by some sort of matching inverse behavior from Republicans, but this is not happening.

Instead, while Democrats are increasing nationally and in many key Senate-race states their already larger portion of early/mail-in/absentee voting despite a major decrease in their overall portion of their votes cast this way, they are also increasing majorly their presence where they were weakest: at polling stations on Election Day; Republicans, meanwhile are also decreasing their vote share of their overall votes with early/absentee/mail-in votes, though less so, but are also far less so increasing their Election Day turnout, only by four percent to the Democrats’ 14%.

Provided the Pew data is accurate (and it usually is), this means Democrats are pretty much set to gain ground on Republicans’ in both early/mail-in and in-person Election Day voting.

Additionally, consider what was just discussed in terms of overall turnout: early voter turnout is setting recent records in many states and for the U.S. as a whole in 2022 for a midterm election and the overall vote is expected to surpass 2018, which was the biggest proportional midterm turnout of voters since 1914. If the voting margins in favor of Democrats over Republicans for early voting are higher now than they were in recent elections, and, on top of that, a much higher portion of Democrats are set to vote in-person on election day in 2022, a higher turnout seems capable of reinforcing both Democrats’ advantage with the first and its mitigation of the gap regarding the second.  

This may seem a bit confusing so I will try phrasing this another way: in what are currently polling as very close elections (within those margins of error!) and knowing there is already an absolute increase in early/absentee votes for Democrats by 3.1 million votes compared to the last midterm (compared to an decease of about 0.95 million Republicans) as of tallies from closing on Sunday-two-days-before-the-midterms, and with Democrats set to increase their overall portion of their vote on Election Day by 14% (compared, again, to just 4% for Republicans), combined, this more than “suggests” a greater anticipated turnout for Democrats than polls do.

And this effect goes for those polls asking people to rank issues: abortion is also being underrepresented there because the women who prioritize it are also being undersampled and/or underweighted.

Does All This Really Mean Democrats Should be Favored?

Let’s unpack all of this: early voting and mail-in voting overwhelmingly favors Democrats; if they are outperforming their portions relative to Republicans in early voting compared to 2020 and 2018, that’s a good sign for Democrats.  But with COVID not as much of a problem, Democrats voting early and mail-in are down as a proportion of total Democratic votes cast.  You might be thinking: “Wait, even if the margin of Democrats voting early or absentee is higher relative to Republicans, if a lower portion of Democrats are voting early, would that not hurt Democrats, since Republicans are much stronger on Election Day?”  No, again, because Democrats are making up for it by voting in-person a lot more on Election Day this year.  So, again, this means that Democrats are outperforming both their margins in terms of the share of overall early voting and their share of the overall in-person Election Day voting, improving their margin where they are weakest and weakening the GOP’s advantage where it is strongest.  And with more women, Democrats, and young people overall registering, and with Pew’s October survey only having a four-percent-higher share of Republicans’ total votes coming from Election Day in-person voting compared to 2020, will Republicans have enough to overcome these other powerful trends in favor of Democrats that I have highlighted?

I think not.

Taken together, all this suggests Democrats will represent a higher share of the overall votes this election cycle than in previous ones, and, alongside the far higher post-Dobbs portions of women vs. men registering to vote, the also higher portion of Democrats registering, and the higher-than-usual under-25 crowd registering, well, this adds up to some serious math in favor of the Democrats.

Polling is a lot of guesswork, but early voting data and voter registration numbers are hard numbers that are not projections based on samples: in other words, that data is based on actual behavior and factual in a way polling is not; a poll could put together a weighted sample that does not actually reflect the election turnout, as discussed earlier, but the voter registration and early voting data are simply what they are.

So this means that there are multiple data points of compelling, hard evidence based on real-world numbers and not estimates, that the current set of polls—in particular failing to account for a mass mobilization of women that should have women forming a significantly higher portion of the overall electorate than elections in the past—are significantly underrepresenting the female vote as a portion of the overall turnout and, thus, are favoring Republicans by at least several percentage points across the board.

By significantly, I mean enough to swing most key races in most key swing states, as those races are neck-and-neck and are basically polling ties within the margins of error.  This means you can expect the portion of votes not only to be, in this sense, significantly higher for Democrats than the polls are indicating, but that, in those close elections, most of those races should break in the Democrats’ favor, with the gender gap making a serious—and the—difference for the Democrats in most of these marquee races, for, even though the level of the gender gap varies, in almost every state, it still favors women (and pro-choice-type women) and far more than it did in 2020, when Democrats won the presidency, Senate, and House.

All this, in the end, is heartening to me.  In many past elections, people were not fired up or fired up enough.  They didn’t vote because they didn’t feel enough “enthusiasm” or were sore losers that preferred another candidate did not win their party’s nomination: they were asleep at the wheel of their own democracy.  Well, after 2016, by the 2018 midterms, they woke up, and by 2020, they drove the car out of the ditch they had crashed it into back in 2016, so it would be a damn shame for them to go right back into that ditch by rewarding the people who sought to overthrow the government in a coup, resulting in the first non-peaceful presidential transfer of power in U.S. history, going back all the way to 1797 overall and 1801 between parties, to hand the people supporting and excusing that ongoing insurrection attempt the very keys to the halls of power after they literally smashed those halls’ windows and smeared feces on their walls as they sought out our elected leaders with deadly intent.  The initial results of this midterm election are evidence that we will not reward the traitors.

What Would It Take for Me to Be Wrong?

In an ideal world, people not of a particular group could lead proportionately in supporting a different group.  In the real world, members of any group better be prepared to stick up for their own rights more intensely than anyone else.  In an ideal world, we could count on men to dismantle patriarchy as much as women, even more so since they have a larger part in its construction and implementation.  In the real world, more women than men are going to have to try and try harder than men in order for patriarchy to be dismantled.

To be clear: I have faith in women.  I think they have been awakened in the way Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto apparently feared America would be awakened after Pearl Harbor.

I generally find Bill Burr to be funny but also sometimes crass and offensive, and you can determine for yourselves what you think of him in this clip but his point within about the WNBA’s issues with selling tickets—that not as many women and feminists attend WNBA games as men and macho-types attend NBA games—stands.

I hope I didn’t lose any of you with the tough love from Bill Burr, but the point I am making here, ladies, is that we still have a free and fair election system (they may make it harder on purpose for some of you specifically to vote, but they still can’t stop you or your vote if properly cast from being counted) and that, if I am wrong and this data somehow doesn’t mean a big surge in women voting to protect the rights of women to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, it’s not going be because of patriarchy, it’s going to be because, when faced with a threat from patriarchy, far, far too many women simply shrugged, didn’t mobilize to vote, or just prioritized other “issues” they foolishly perceived Republicans to be “better” on; as I noted, these elections are close, and it won’t take an insane number of you to make that difference between victory and defeat for Democrats: the vast majority of those 32% of women who did not vote in 2020 don’t even have to vote, just enough, and your rights are preserved.  If women fail to do so when it is so easily in their power, too many of them will have surrendered their rights without a real fight.

To be clear, some women are the enemies of women’s rights: about a third to 40% of women think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases; (Pew and Gallup, respectively).  There are more men that think this (though not dramatically), but those are hardly insignificant minorities of women.  And enough men support you that only a modest increase in pro-choice women voting in this election could have a real impact.

So, again, I have faith in women and that they are going to embarrass the pollsters, but if I am wrong, well, that’s basically the only explanation, sadly, all things being equal (other than the polls somehow being skewed significantly and wrongly in favor of Democrats across the board): that not enough additional women voted, that too many thought it was another “normal” election and did not take their own destinies into their own hands when they could, that only a minor surge resulted that did not have enough impact.  I wish with all my heart that all men supported a women’s right to choose, but please do not rely on us to protect your rights for you, ladies, you vote for your rights!

That may sound harsh, but if my analysis is accurate and Dobbs overturning Roe does not mobilize a significant number of new female midterm voters determined to protect abortion rights, and if Democrats come out on the short end along with abortion rights for all American women, then that would be a crushing disappointment (and I can say the same for everyone equally of all genders when it comes to protecting democracy from fascism).

Having said that, any men on the fence or who didn’t vote but can, please join those of us already doing our part…

Conclusion: Democrats Should Outperform Their Polls and Hold Congress! BUT VOTE ANYWAY!!

Having expressed my reservations and covered my ass, I really am confident the Democrats will hold onto Congress after all the votes are counted and at least increase their position in the Senate, and that a surge in women voters unanticipated by the polls will be the main reason why. 

Because folks, the normal 53-51 female vs 47-49 male breakdown just isn’t going capture what is happening this year.  That’s what most polls, even in the states where there have been huge increases in the portion of women registering over men, are sticking to (in fact, every poll I have looked at where they display this information clearly is within or very close to these pre-Dobbs margins).  So you can safely take many of the polls you are looking at and add at least a few points to Democrats, take a few percent away from Republicans—that’s if these polls are generally accurate apart from this glaring issue—and you will have your actual outcome.  And polls are estimates, but the voter registration data is actual registration data.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight recently noted that if there was a significant across-the-board polling error, it could mean either a blowout by Republicans or actual gains by Democrats, depending in which direction.  Well, given what we know from what I’ve told you here, we can safely assume the latter is more likely, and that is what my premise has been: an across-the-board if varying polling error that is inflating what GOP performance will be and deflating what Democratic turnout will be.

Which sounds great if you’re not ignorant or a fascist.  As I noted a while ago, we’re past normal right-left “issues,” for the survival of our democracy is stake (and I’m sorry, but poo-poo to anyone saying it was stupid for Democrats to campaign in part on saving freaking’ democracy!): to quote Gen. Ulysses. S. Grant: “There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party.”

I think preserving women’s rights to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom and standing up to fascism and authoritarianism are deeply allied fights.  And, again, I think the hard voter data I outline here favors Democrats in these midterms.  If we do win, THANK YOU LADIES!

In the end, though, just make sure you vote!

*correction appended: this article originally misstated the year the last time midterm turnout was this high, 1912 instead of 1914

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023.

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Fourth Episode: Election Day Edition

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Notes:

In an Election Day-episode, my old professor, Dr. Mark Rush, the Director of International Education and Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, discusses polling in American politics, the 2020 election, the Supreme Court, and partisanship and division in the country.

Link to the Five Thirty Eight polling averages mentioned

Here are links to two versions of the article of Dr. Rush’s that was mentioned

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  November 3, 2020 NOTE: This map and article accidentally earlier included South Dakota in Biden’s column

SILVER SPRING—This article will be uncharacteristically short, so let’s get to it.

If )we just go by the polls, former-Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris would be winning with an overwhelming Electoral College landslide: according to the essential Five Thirty Eight weighted polling averages, Biden is ahead by small (though not razor-thin) margins in the Southern swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, as well being ahead similarly in Arizona.  Biden is close in the other key swing states of Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, just behind President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence by even closer margins.  Ann Selzer, the “best pollster in politics,” had Trump a few days ago +7 in Iowa, and I think he will just manage to hang on in Ohio.  Because of the GOP propensity to effectively suppress votes in the South (i.e., cheat), I am not giving Biden any of those Southern states (North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, or Texas, but wow, Texas is purple now…).  However, I think there is a decent chance for Biden take Arizona (and there is an especially-strong, and high-performing, Democratic Senate candidate there in the form of Mark Kelly, former astronaut and husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived a terrorist shooting her in the head and became a famous advocate for stricter gun laws), so I will favor him slightly there.  Those weird congressional districts with separate Electoral College-awardings in Nebraska and Maine I am giving to Biden since he seemed to have decent leads there.  His decent lead in Pennsylvania and larger leads in Michigan and Wisconsin seem to make those pretty safe for Biden too (though Pennsylvania less so), so my official Map is Biden 291, Trump 247, with Biden retaking the Midwest states Clinton lost in 2016 that Obama had won 2012.

If I am wrong, it would probably be Arizona and I think that we could also most likely see Florida go to Biden with so many displaced Puerto Ricans from Hurricane Maria living there or that Trump might upset in Pennsylvania with Biden’s comments about fracking and energy policy hurting him there (as a sign of this, Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette, which had endorsed Obama twice and has not endorsed a Republican since 1972, surprisingly endorsed Trump on economic grounds even though it called his “unpresidential manners and character” an “embarrassment”).  I also think there is a decent chance Ohio could go to Biden.  And a lot of the states mentioned and a few others could go either way, but I think if I am wrong, that is where I will most likely be wrong.

And yet, if the Republican-controlled courts, with the newly installed Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, get to decide by stopping vote counts or tossing out ballots, the election could be stolen.  But even with a polling error within the margin of error like in 2016, Biden should win with my map, minus Arizona.  I would love to believe Republican cheating will not be effective, but I feel that would be going against history. And it is hard to account for postal sabotage on the part of the Trump Administration.  

Of course, none of this accounts for possible election interference, hacking, or cyberwarfare…

But that’s it.  That’s my prediction.  Biden wins.  The world is saved.

NOTE: This map and article accidentally earlier included South Dakota in Biden’s column

See Brian’s two pieces where he out-predicted all of the mainstream press in picking Biden to win the nomination before early March’s Super Tuesday: Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina; & Why Putin Boost Bernie Sanders and The Best Guide to Super Tuesday (no, seriously): Biden’s Got This (and the Nomination)

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him

Third (mini-)Episode: Biden-Trump debate preview

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Notes:

Five Thirty Eight polling averages: (2016: Clinton 42.4%, Trump 41%) Sept 26th, 1st debate (Johnson 7.5) Today: 50.2% Biden, Trump 43.2%

Five Thirty Eight 2016 national polling averages

Five Thirty Eight 2020 national polling average

On 2016 Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson taking roughly equally from both Trump and Clinton

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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Corrections: When I said I have “sympathy” for whites proud to be white, I meant “empathy” for their sorry state

I said the black vote for Clinton in 2016 was 86-87%.  It was 89%.

I was wrong when I suggested that black Caribbean immigrants are more educated than average Americans, but was right when I said Nigerian, African immigrants were

I said Trump was involved with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, but it was Bear Stearns and FL Group; relevant passage from my eBook (general preview here) below:

“Let us also pause here to note Trump’s direct involvement with two major financial firms—Bear Stearns and FL Group—just before they failed and were the two major catalysts for the worst global economic crises since the Great Depression.  FL Group failed spectacularly in 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks and funds.  The firm’s failure was a major factor in the collapse of Iceland’s financial sector, a collapse that served as a catalyst for the 2008 global financial crisis and America’s Great Recession.  Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close (direct and/or indirect) ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking that they were acting more out of Kremlin interests than business ones.  In the case of Bear Stearns, its collapse would be the first big domino on the U.S. side of the global financial crises and the catalyst for the U.S. Great Recession.  The Trump deals were not insignificant and were important factors in both firms’ collapses, so, it would not be without accuracy to say that Donald Trump played an important role in causing the economic crises that erupted in 2008.”

I said there were eight investigations into Clinton’s e-mails/server but that was really about Benghazi (and there were nine), which Republicans did their best to tie to Clinton’s e-mails

References: My piece on how the current media landscape lacks proper analysis-May 2016, 2018

In terms of far-left and identity-driven injecting their opinions/pressures into news reporting at The New York Times and the mainstream media and how media elites are generally unrepresentative, see Bari Weiss’s resignation letter, Andrew Sullivan’s penultimate New York Magazine column and two of his new Weekly Dish pieces

On lack of exit polling data in 2020: Florida, strength of Biden support with young POC in SC, MS

On Biden’s stuttering and “mental sharpness, a ”NYT Column and the key Atlantic article it references

On white conservatives thinking white people are the people being discriminated by others

On the 1994 crime bill, two pieces from Vox and D.L. Hughley’s comments

The “Brian gets it WAY before virtually all his competition” pieces mentioned or relevant:

On Trump as a “serious” candidate-August 10, 2015

On Bernie being a HUGE problem for Democrats and helping Trump-February 17/18, 2016 and March 11, 2016

On Trump and Clinton sealing the nominations-February 21/22, 2016

On Hillary’s e-mails being much ado about nothing-Oct 21, 2015, Aug 10, 2016, & Sept 23, 2016

On Americans not valuing experience or expertise as a bad can of worms-May 13, 2016

On Russia being THE story-July 30/31, 2016

On Trump’s insanely shady business ties with the Russian mafia- November 4, 2016, March 28, 2016, and July 27, 2016

On what I call the First Russo-American Cyberwar & 38,000 votes deciding election-Dec 7, 2016

On Biden looking good before SC– Feb 26, 2016

On Biden having it wrapped on before Super Tuesday-March 3, 2016

Other work of mine referenced or relevant: 

On Russian disinformation (Clinton e-mails overkill)-November 19, 2019 and May 26, 2020

On the Bidens and Burisma and disinformation-December 18, 2019

On why Bernie is incapable of achieving his goals—February 5, 2016 and March 20, 2020

On GOP no longer being a legit political party and Dems facing down extremism-Nov 13, 2016

On Comey letter just before the 2016 election-October 29, 2016

My coronavirus coverage-May 26, 2010 and later

On the post-WWII U.S.-led “neoliberal” order & lifting billions from poverty-August 26, 2020

On white racism in the U.S. against African-Americans-June 13, 2020 and January 7, 2015

On the resumes of Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, compared-August 8, 2020

On Benghazi-November 3, 2015

My old podcasts (2014-2016)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 20, 2020

SILVER SPRING—This piece is going to be less about research and facts and more just personal reflection, but quite analytical still.  So let us dive in.

Harris the Senator and Candidate: Not Her Best Self

As I noted before in one recent piece, I thought Kamala Harris had an impressive resume but that Susan Rice’s resume was far more impressive vice presidentially and that it was not even close.

I stand by that analysis.

After I wrote that piece, I began writing another looking at personality and other intangible aspects to rate both Rice and Harris as candidates.  I had gotten through half of what I had originally planned, finishing the part on first impressions, when it was announced that Harris was the pick.  I was slightly surprised, and then began thinking more and more about(now-) Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden picking her, and what that meant.  I had laid out earlier serious concerns about who Harris was as a person and how she chose to present and conduct herself in key moments in her career public career as a senator.  Biden’s picking her did not mean that my concerns were invalid, but it did mean that he has thought of them, spoken with and vetted her, and left confident that her positives outweighed, by far, those concerns.

So, as I wrote my conclusion to that last piece, I decided to look at her in a new light.  And I had realized, in that white-and-male dominated rat-race of politics, Kamala understandably felt a tremendous amount of pressure as a woman of color.  New to a gridlocked Senate and not able to pass any of her legislation, she focused, instead, on trying to create viral moments much like Warren’s “Nevertheless, she persisted” moment, as I detailed in my last piece and for which SNL satirized her.

Since I mentioned the NBA basketball documentary The Last Dance in my previous pieces, I will compare some of these moves to Reggie Miller initiating contact, expertly, and getting an offensive foul called on a defender: a cheap but very effective ploy.  I admit, without such moments, it would have been hard for her to get attention and distinguish herself in a gridlocked senate.  But as someone who was an athlete in high school and a huge Kicks fan, I hate Reggie Miller and cheap, fake play like that.  I just do not like those kinds of cheap, media-driven moves, but hey, my purist style is probably not opportunistic enough for a freshman junior senator trying to run for president; I understand the politics behind such plays and can appreciate it as an effective tactic (just look at Reggie), but I do not have to like it, as I mentioned in my last piece.

Well, Harris and her campaign doubled down on this kind of conduct in 2019 in the presidential campaign and debates, most notably in cheap shots against Biden and Warren (the latter really backfiring but both probably souring her with Democrats who do not like seeing their beloved figures suffer from friendly fire that is unfair; it did not work for Sec. Julían Castro, either, for the record) and even Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who ripped her apart on her criminal justice record.  Now, I cannot stand fringe-y, wacky Tulsi Gabbard (though I respect her military service), but the way in which Harris did not really defend her record but, instead, punched down at Gabbard in response—as if Gabbard was simply beneath her—was also not impressive to me and rubbed me very much the wrong way.

But I am a policy wonk who likes fair, accurate, collegial (when within the Party, at least) campaigning and avoiding the cheap shots, taking the high road.  And, in the end, my guy with that style won and got the nomination.  Still, at the time, Biden saw what I did not: a tough, aggressive rival whose fire could be turned effectively against the GOP in a general election, who could competently deflect away from things she did not want to answer, and would be a good complement for a guy who is too open and says too much about his vulnerabilities, is too candid.  In other words, she could be different and was in ways that would enhance the ticket as a number two far beyond just being younger, a woman, and a person of color.

I also knew she had a friendship with Beau Biden, the heroic, accomplished son of Joe’s who succumbed to cancer in 2015.  What I did not know was how close Kamala was with Beau, and that this closeness helped create an authentic relationship between Joe and Kamala.  But that relationship between Joe and Kamala just did not come out on the campaign trail in 2019, not on TV and certainly not at the debates.  Harris was going to put her friendship with Biden aside and play aggressively to win by going after Joe and letting Joe defend himself rather than take chances to defend him, too, even with the Hunter Biden, Ukraine,  and Burisma smears.  This was at a time when it was very possible (especially if Harris had run a very different campaign) for Harris to put herself in a position to overtake Biden in ways that were never realistic other candidates.  Again, I do not have to like it, but, at the same time, Harris had a real shot, she felt that would work, and negative cheap-shot campaigning is far from the most insane tactic from a rationalist perspective; sometimes, politics really is House of Cards.  I can respect that as a candidate choice even if I do not like it.  It just did not work, thanks to Democratic primary voters and in spite of biased mainstream media coverage and because.  And, thankfully for me as a Biden supporter, this was in part because Harris ran an overall terrible campaign.  The opportunity to build enough support passed for Harris, she saw the writing on the wall, and, like Joe Biden in his 1988 election cycle presidential campaign dropping out in late 1987, dropped out even before 2020 began.

Biden Picks Harris for the Real Kamala

But Biden was clearly impressed with Harris’s grit, and, from the personal relationship few knew they had, he knew things most Americans did not know about her: her warm, thoughtful, unrehearsed, tender, compassionate, funny, fun, likable (dare I say humble?) side.  While a large portion of Harris’s major public displays since becoming a senator were calculated, shallow, and not highlighting in deep, substantive ways her impressive, substantive record, Joe knew the real Kamala when she was not trying too hard, not so desperate to distinguish herself in an ineffective Senate and a crowded debate stage.

So it was that I began to think that he must know her in ways I did not, and gave Biden the benefit of the doubt in picking her and, thus, gave her the benefit of the doubt.  If Biden could be big in putting aside Harris’s cheap attacks, trusting that what he saw in her was greater than my less-familiar impressions, even if they were consistent, I could put those attacks aside too (“All’s fair in love and war and politics too??” [meh]).  I began to get excited about the speech she would give the next day as I was writing my conclusion to my second Harris piece, and the moment that was put out on social media, when she was delighted, surprised, and humbled when Biden offered her the VP slot, was a different side of her, what I felt must be the real Kamala, what it seems she had in some ways been hiding from me and many others who did not know her better.  The person she thought would work politically may not have, but I could not wait to see her the next day give her first speech as Joe’s VP selection.

But even before then, I began to realize where I had been wrong in other ways.  Rice easily had the best resume, and I care little for flash, for theatrical performance, for how “cool” or smooth someone was when weighed against policy chops, expertise, and experience.  But guess what: there are very few voters like me, and most voters will pick the “cool” telegenic candidate over Albert Einstein himself.  And I realized, that, politically, sacrificing some substance and experience for a person who has exceptional poise, stage presence, and charisma (even when Harris is falling flat, you see glimpses of that, and I had seen a few far better moments here and there) but who still has a relatively impressive resume is the best fit politically, especially for such a crisis moment that amounts either the survival or death of our democracy, as former President President Barack Obama himself made terrifyingly clear last night.

Basically, I put too much stock on experience and expertise (Rice) and not enough on optics and performance.  If we had three grades for each candidate—substance, style, and baggage—Harris would be score higher than rice; even if her substance score was not nearly as high as Rice’s, her style score—when Harris is at her best—was incredibly high and she has far less baggage that can hurt.  And it is not that Rice is not also a great personality, it is simply that Harris is one of those rare top-tier-with-very-few peers-level-of-charisma people.  I think Rice could have won Americans over, but she also has the whole Benghazi and unmasking “baggage,” which, though totally nonsense and made-up smears obviously concocted by Republicans, still would have admittedly stuck and dogged a Biden-Rice campaign throughout the election (just ask Hillary Clinton how damaging false smears can be!).  So Rice, though more substantive, had more risks whereas Harris was relatively lower-risk, higher political reward, still strong substantively, and did not have any of that Benghazi-Clinton-Obama Administration baggage; Rice was an old Washington Hand (which I loved) but Harris was fresh, new, and exiting (which pretty much everyone else loved).  I did not consider politics enough (though a VP is mainly needed as a governing partner) and, especially for campaigning in the coronavirus era, did not consider enough the ability to produce energetic, viral clips nearly enough.  As a policy wonk, I needed to remember that wonks are a political constituency that amounts to the negligible and recognize the importance of mass appeal to a public that generally will not care as much about someone being an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs or a peacekeeping specialist on the National Security Council as they will about sheer star power.

In short, I was wrong to favor Rice over Harris if you take politics, not just resumes, into account.

Kamala’s Real Self Is Her Best self

And yet, that was Harris’s fault, because of the way she campaigned and presented herself since becoming a senator in key moments when she had the most exposure.

So when Harris was formally introduced to speak as Joe’s VP pick by Joe himself, when I saw the real Kamala Harris, a.k.a. Mamala, when I saw the emotion and tenderness with which she spoke about her relationship with Beau and how Beau was the one who really made her understand what made Joe Biden so special, when I saw how deeply she respected Joe and appreciated Joe, when I saw her warmth and grace in a setting where she did not have to fight to be remembered on a stage with about ten other people, when I saw the grace, dignity, and humility with which she accepted this honor, and when I saw the measured but more natural version of the fierce prosecutor, indicting Trump not in a soundbite but in but methodical, righteous detail, with measured yet genuine anger and scorn that felt organic and not staged, I was fully on board with Team Kamala.

Biden’s pick of her brough me over to her in my head, but Kamala herself won over my heart when I got to see the real her in this first real speech by her as Joe’s running mate.  Joe had picked the most magnetic and charismatic person available from the entire pool of presidential candidates and other VP hopefuls, and, apart from Rice, the person with the best resume among all of the mentioned VP contenders: in other words, the best VP candidate possible for this moment, especially at a time of great reckoning and awakening and tragedy, when someone not a woman of color would have affected enthusiasm among some key voting blocks, especially younger voters of all colors, whose level of cynicism and disaffection may be what determines the outcome of this election (if it is voting that will determine it and not voter suppression or Russian interference).

Harris and Biden: A New Hope Bringing Out the Best in Each Other

To be clear, I am (cautiously) optimistic Biden can and will win by a lot (though I am also filled with dread, but more on that another time), and I think no matter his VP selection, this would be the case as long as it was not someone too far-left for most Americans, like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren (sorry Bernie and Liz fans, that’s political reality, but thanks to both senators for such solid support for Biden!), so I do not buy what some of the punditry—especially, understandably, those so strongly identifying with and seeing themselves in Harris—are saying along the lines of Biden “needing” Harris,” or that the man perhaps most steeped in policy of any major-party nominee in American history “needed” her on any particular issue or with any particular demographic.

But I strongly believe Harris is a major win-win even allowing for stupid racists and misogynists, that Harris adds a lot to Biden’s team, that her different perspective as the last second-opinion in the room will be good and valuable to Biden much like one way Obama found Biden so valuable, and am thrilled—even ecstatic—that she will be by his side during the campaign and, we should all hope, in the White House.

To be clear, I though her speech when Biden introduced her was perfect.  Literally perfect.  As was her speech accepting the Vice-Presidential nomination, and with that first speech, I was an enthusiastically on board with Team Kamala.  Harris, freed of the inane pressure of having just a few minutes to shine, showed her real self, the one Joe loves and Beau Biden loved, the one I had only seen glimpses of, in its full glory.  This side of Harris reminded me, too, why I love Biden, for he chose so wisely and so well: Harris is no black-Indian Palin, so, she is a singularity in this election cycle when freed to be herself by herself and the format.  She will demolish Vice President Mike Pence one-on-one and electrify the campaign trail like Palin did for (the now late) Sen. John McCain, though not with crass appeal to racists and xenophobes, but with grace and substance, hope and accountability.

I had serious issues with Harris.  I was offended by how she conducted herself, and though I respected her talent and accomplishments, I just was not feeling her.  I also had issues with her record.  But Joe’s faith in Harris as demonstrated by his picking her and Kamala’s own since her selection—her conduct in rising decidedly to the occasion—made me realize who the real Kamala Harris was I was sold.  Even on policy, as Peter Beinart persuasively argues in The Atlantic, as a trailblazing black-Indian-American woman trying to win statewide office California, she more or less did what she had to do.

So now?  Call me a Kamala Convert.

Kamala—Senator Harris—thank you for showing me and so many others your real-self.  Joe is so smart to have picked you and so lucky to have you by his side.  The Democratic Party may very well have found its next Obama, and America may have found the perfect teammate for Biden to both beat Trump and Pence like a drum out of the White house and save America, democracy, and the world from Donald Trump’s insanity, tribalism, and a rising fascism, as a Democratic Party Batman and Robin: Joe as Batman and Kamala as a much cooler-than-normal, way-more-stylish Robin.  They are the superhero duo we need now, and let me be an example of how one of Harris’s superpowers is winning over serious doubters to become fervent supporters.

See related previous articles: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice and Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  March 10, 2020 (this was written, if not fully edited, before results came in tonight); see related articles: The Best Guide to Super Tuesday (no, seriously): Biden’s Got This (and the Nomination), Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina, Sandernista Political Terrorism II: Sanders Derangement Syndrome, the Liberal Tea Party, & How Nevada Riot Pretty Much Sums Up Team Bernie, and The Sandernista Political Revolution Handbook: A Matchup Game of Bernie Sanders’ Talking Points & Those of His Fans/Supporters

WASHINGTON AND ARLINGTON—As I have noted repeatedly before, the lack of self-awareness among Bernie Sanders and his Sandernista would-be-fellow revolutionaries is among the most irritating of their (many) irritating traits.  In particular, at this stage in the quest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (or, as many Bernie Sanders supporters would think of it, the quest to hijack, destroy internally, and replace the Democratic Party with a democratic socialist party), one thing that strikes me is how they constantly act as if they are the only group with legitimate grievances. This has been something that has long bothered me, but as Bernieworld becomes increasingly unhinged, they act as if they have a monopoly on disappointment, frustration, anger, and rage within the left.  They are indignant about how the media, other candidates, and other supporters talk about and frame them and their candidate, yet rarely pause to consider if, let alone acknowledge that, other candidates and their supporters have similar feelings directed at not just the media but back at Bernieworld (and, yes, the other major candidates, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, have made clear that Bernie bros are in a category all their own on the left).  A group that in part lives off of their rage at what they term “The Establishment” and at any and all criticism directed their way—no matter how small—cannot seem to even fathom that they themselves may also cause offense, be unfair, should adjust how they speak and act towards others.  In fact, the mere suggestion of this seems to send them into even more rage, with their best reaction usually righteous indignation.

Reality, Ever the Enemy of Sanders and his Sandernistas

As is the case regarding so much with Bernie Sanders, his supporters, and Sandersism, there is their talk and then there is the massive gap between talk and reality. 

In 2016, his arguments were largely disproven by the dramatic way in which voters rejected their premises, with 3.7+ million more voters preferring Clinton, and this was with 14 states (28% of all states) holding caucuses, undemocratic and unrepresentative abominations that greatly depress turnout and overrepresent the enthusiastic and those without certain burdens (like having kids).  The net political effect of these caucuses was to dramatically inflate voting margins in Bernie’s favor, as Sanders blew Clinton out of the water in 12 of those 14 caucus states and only lost relatively narrowly in the other 2.  To ram this point home, in 2 of these states that Sanders won (Nebraska and Washington state) among the 12 of the caucuses he won, Clinton even won nonbinding primaries (or normal votes) that had far greater turnout.  Sanders, then, would have almost certainly have lost some caucus states he won if they were primaries (which happened in 2020 with Minnesota and Maine ditching caucuses) and his margin would definitely have been much lower even in the caucus states he won and also in those he lost.  In other words, the 3.7-million-vote margin of victory for Clinton over Sanders with voters would have been significantly larger with representative primaries than the numbers we have from 2016 would on the surface seem to suggest.

In 2016, Democratic turnout was dramatically lower (30.6 million) than in 2008 (37.1 million).  Basically,  Hillary Clinton—one of the top faces of the Democratic Party for decades—soundly beat Sanders because Democrats liked her for president much more than Bernie, and the idea that brand new voters were going to join the Democratic Party to shift it dramatically to the left into democratic socialist territory, that Bernie was going to be the inspiration for this high turnout and new voters flies in this face of these considerations.. Especially with young people, that turnout did not happen.  Instead, Democrats chose a far more traditional candidate (though revolutionary in her identity as far as her being a woman, the first major-party female nominee for president in American history) rather than an insurgent running a campaign that sought to overthrow the system as a whole.  Democrats actually like the Democratic Party, and Clinton garnered close over 3.7 million more votes than Sanders even with the caucus factor diluting Clinton’s margins.  So, while as a woman, Clinton could claim something of an outsider status, too, her politics were pretty institutional and mainstream in many ways and especially compared to Sanders.  Clinton was also one of the top faces of the Democratic Party for decades and handily outperformed Bernie with Democrats, so the idea that the American left overall hates the Democratic Party, hates its “Establishment” figures like, say, Hillary, or Barack Obama, or Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Whip Jim Clyburn, simply has no factual basis.  Bernie campaigned against the Democratic Party itself as well as its leaders, but it turns out Democratic voters like them just fine.  So the notion that Bernie Sanders himself is somehow going to drive historic turnout—when turnout was way down in 2016 from 2008 when Sanders was one of two major contenders in a race in which Sanders got beat by some 3.7 million votes even with dramatically lower turnout—is patently absurd and has no logical or empirical basis to support it.

For the sake of argument, though, let us even pretend that the exact same arguments were not made in 2016, plainly for all to hear, and that they were not dramatically disproven in a Democratic nomination contest that underrepresented Clinton’s support in the 28% of all state contests that held caucuses.  Let’s pretend we are in a brave new world (Sanders and his people like to make the claim that the electorate has dramatically changed in just the past few years) and look at how his political performance in contests so far in 2020 matches his claims; let’s see how much his bark matches his bite.

Premise/Assumption: People were tired of the Democratic Party and the way it did things.  Instead, they would choose a new, revolutionary campaign, one with which they could smash the “Establishment.”

Reality: There has so far only been one state where Bernie Sanders did not receive fewer votes than more proud-to-be-actual-Democrats Democrats combined: his home state of Vermont, the only state in 2020 thus far where he has received more than 50% of the vote. Despite the narrative that the alt-left “progressive” non-Democrat leftists would sell, the simple reality is that Democrats overall were happy with a number of candidates in the 2020 field and with the Party overall; Speaker Nancy Pelosi is popular with a vast majority of Democrats, too.  What’s better than polls and approval ratings, though, is votes, and with Sanders receiving less than 30% of the overall vote so far, voters have overwhelming preferred existing Democrats to those who want to smash the Democratic Party. In most states, Sanders has been in 20s, a few in the teens, and some in 30s as far as vote/caucus delegate percent-share, but in no states prior to today besides his home state of Vermont and Nevada has this threshold passed 37%. The American far-left loves Sanders, but, as I have pointed out before, this is a country where only six states have more liberals than conservatives. No, this is not a man building a broad movement that can succeed on a national level, just a fraction of a faction that can disrupt and destabilize the left but has little talent or ability beyond that.

Premise/assumption: Bernie Sanders is a generational transformational figure who will inspire turnout at historic, unprecedented levels; his claim to having this ability is the central premise to his argument of a.) how he can win the nomination, b.) how he can win the general election, and c.) somehow, without ever actually explaining it, how he will govern and how he will get his agenda passed amidst intense opposition (the oft-heard “millions of people in the streets” phrase).

Reality: Even when Bernie won states in this 2020 cycle—other than his own state of Vermont—loud and proud members of the actual Democratic Party (Bernie is still an independent) got far more votes combined (yes, even in California), often dramatically more votes when combined.  Where turnout is increasing, it’s increasing, generally, in states going strongly for Biden and dramatically so.  So Bernie has failed to do the very thing he claimed he, uniquely, could do, while Biden actually did it, not with phantom progressives but with actual suburban swing voters that are the real key to elections. And youth turnout was typically low; there was no #BernieSurge.  In every state contest so far, Sanders has received fewer votes (or state delegate percentages) than he did in 2016, and in most cases, the drop has been dramatic.  Even in his home state of Vermont, Sanders received an over 35% lower portion of the votes (50.7%) than he did in 2016 (86.1%).  The truth, then, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the narrative being spun by Sanders and his surrogates for, no matter how you slice or dice it, Bernie Sanders, is less popular and is receiving less support than he was four years ago in every state that has voted thus far.

And there are states Bernie won in 2016—Oklahoma, Maine, and Minnesota—that shifted decisively away from him in 2020.  In terms of states he lost in 2016, yes, he won Nevada and seems to have won California, but in both those cases—as in every case so far—he still performed worse than in 2016, and, in the case of California, significantly worse. In fact, as I noted before, Nevada was also a bit of a red herring in that, since it was a caucus, it overrepresented his support with nonwhites, just as caucuses overrepresent Bernie’s support in all groups, but the media and, it seems, the Bernie campaign, took the bait and thought Bernie just might have chipped into African-American support enough to topple Biden. In the end, non-caucus South Carolina put that nonsense to rest six feet under and then some.

How can we expect a candidate to mobilize a solid coalition to defeat Trump in November if he can’t even get that supposed coalition out to get him the nomination first?  How can we expect a candidate who claims to be able to mobilize millions of people in the streets to bring pressure to bear on opponents once he is president be able to do so if the very people he is talking about stay home when he is in the fight of his life to win the nomination?  How can we expect him to win when he’s losing support compared to what he had in 2016?

Super Tuesday II: The Last Formal Battle of The Sandernista Insurgency

The answer is: we can’t.

Polls have been wrong before (but not usually), so Bernie might have a miracle and stay alive in theory (that would be a miracle) or at least in a cosmetic sense.  But there are many recent polls that have Bernie being crushed tonight in just about every state or losing narrowly in territory like Washington state that should be favorable to him.  And while, yes, the pollsters missed big in Michigan in 2016, they’re at least good enough to be on the lookout to avoid similar mistakes based on the same errors. But the fact is that, just like in 2016, even if Bernie does win Michigan, he still won’t turn it around.  He will still lose big in other states and the delegate gap for him will only grow; it is just a matter of how quickly that gap will grow.

Once this becomes obvious after tonight, will Bernie lose and bow out gracefully, or will he lose and lead (or at least not try to stop) a Sandernista terrorist insurgency against Biden and the Democratic Party as they try to marshal their strength against Trump?  The fate of the general election may hinge on the answer to this question, but if 2016 is any indication, that will be bad news for Democrats, the country, and the world and good news for Trump, Putin, and selfish, nihilist anarchists

Bernie Sanders has fought for justice as he saw it his whole adult life. He has dedicated himself to trying to make the world a better place and fighting for many of the voiceless. He deserves credit for inspiring so many from such an underdog position back in 2015 when he first announced his presidential candidacy. But how you behave in defeat is often a defining aspect of how history passes judgement on your actions and a real revealer of character. Sanders was rightly called out for the way he went about losing in 2016, for dragging his feet and keeping up intense attacks on Clinton and the Democratic Party when it was clear he was not to be the nominee, substantively damaging Clinton in ways that helped Trump win the election, something I warned about throughout the 2016 election. This is truly the moment of truth for Bernie Sanders in the twilight of his career. Will he be associated with unproductive, scorched-earth tactics that tore the left apart at the moment when Trump threatened the survival of the American republic as we know it? Or will Bernie understand, and move hard to make his followers understand, that some things are bigger than your movement and your passion?

The formal war is ending, and tonight is almost certainly the last time Sanders can put up any serious resistance in a delegate-rich state.  His Waterloo will be Michigan.  The only real question is if Sanders surrenders gracefully like General Lee at Appomattox or pulls a Saddam Hussein and allows his forces to melt away in order to mount a vicious guerrilla campaign once the big formal battles are over.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006. He is currently in no way professionally affiliated with the Biden 2020 campaign, nor is receiving any compensation from it nor the Democratic Party nor any related super-PACs, campaigns, or other political groups involved in the 2020 nominating contests and elections.

See related articles: The Best Guide to Super Tuesday (no, seriously): Biden’s Got This (and the Nomination), Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina, Sandernista Political Terrorism II: Sanders Derangement Syndrome, the Liberal Tea Party, & How Nevada Riot Pretty Much Sums Up Team Bernie, and The Sandernista Political Revolution Handbook: A Matchup Game of Bernie Sanders’ Talking Points & Those of His Fans/Supporters

Correction appended: a comparison of turnout indicated the wrong election year in one of the mentions.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  March 3, 2020; see my related article from before the South Carolina primary where I laid out the below scenario: Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina

WASHINGTON — There is talk that the global market selloffs, in addition to being about COVID-19 (coronavirus) may be something of, to use the economics term, a correction.

We can think about the upcoming Super Tuesday contests as something similar for the Democratic Party: a natural reaction to Sandersism (a virus in and of itself in many ways I have outlined before).

Because it looks like Bernie might have peaked in February, just like in 2016.

Pledged delegates are awarded in two batches, one awarded by state vote share and one awarded by vote share in Congressional districts, and the threshold is 15% for both sets of delegates.  And remember, it takes 1,191 delegates to get the nomination on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention and thereby avoid a contested convention.

So far, only four states have voted and here are the delegate totals, with Biden barely behind Bernie:

Those crowning Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with a few-dozen delegates were fools.  If anything, February was like a wild-card playoff, a pre-playoff playoff.

Let’s just remember how weird Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada are: Iowa is the one Midwestern state without any serious metropolitan area.  New Hampshire also has very few people and is also without a sizable urban area.  Iowa and New Hampshire rank 31^st and 41^st in terms of population, and, as I have noted before, they are the 8^th and 6^th whitest states (while Bernie Sanders’s home state of Vermont is the second-whitest and second-least populous of all the states).  And Nevada, well, is Nevada…

Another thing to think about: In 2016, Hillary Clinton won South Carolina 73.5% to Bernie’s 26%.  This time around, the final vote-count was 48.66% for former Vice President Biden, 19.76% for Bernie.  But if we add the moderates in that race together and add Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie together, we basically get the 2016 Clinton-Bernie margins.  This is extremely bad news for Sanders, for it suggests that in many ways, Bernie has not grown his coalition much and that many states will break down in a way similar to voting patterns from 2016, when Bernie was not even close to matching Clinton for delegates in the end.

Warren still inspires passion and will continue to be a thorn in Bernie’s side as he tries to consolidate the “progressive” wing, but I imagine some Warren supporters who like Bernie, too, will see the writing on the wall (Warren is not likely to win any state today) and some of her support (though not a lot) may shift to Bernie in the face of moderate consolidation.

Finally, a note on former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg: he will not be a non-factor, but I really do expect, at the last minute, his numbers to fade, and, as in South Carolina, I expect undecided late-breakers to break overwhelmingly for Biden, especially with the latest developments.  I think it’s one thing for people to go into a survey and declare they prefer Bloomberg, but another to go in today and vote for him when it is clearly now becoming, for all intents and purposes, a two-person race and more and more obviously so.  I think in most states he will not hit 15% statewide (a crucial threshold for being eligible for delegates).  So, in every state where Bloomberg is polling decently, I expect him to lose a solid chunk of his support and for that shifting support to inflate Biden’s numbers beyond what the polling suggests.  Of course, this is the ex-factor, but data suggests Bloomberg voters are the least committed in the Democratic primary, so I’m sticking with being bearish on Bloomberg.

Breakdown of the 16-Super Tuesday Contests:

Now, let’s look at all the contests!  Each state/territory name will be followed, in parentheses, with the number of pledged delegates up for grabs (all charts are from FiveThirtyEight unless otherwise noted), with more delegates being awarded today than any other day, over one-third of the total pledged delegates in the Democratic nomination process (for comparison, check out delegate and vote totals from 2016 and the below maps):

American Samoa (6) and Democrats abroad (13)

One tiny U.S. territory and Democrats abroad are not U.S. states, so their contests get little attention and are kind of mini-wild cards.  That being said, American Samoa went decidedly for Clinton (even though it was and still is a caucus) and Democrats abroad went decidedly for Sanders in 2016.  With no polling data available, I would guess the best bet is something akin to what happened four years ago but substituting Biden for Clinton, but who knows, so do not place a strong bet on these relatively minor contests.

Who knows?

Vermont (16)

As far as states, only Alaska and Wyoming have fewer delegates.  Bernie should obviously win his home state by a very wide margin, the question is whether he will sweep or will Biden get a sizable minority of delegates in a way that would embarrass Bernie?  With only a few recent polls, there is not much data to go on, but Bernie will win and by a sizable margin.

Bernie wins easily, but can Biden get any delegates?

Maine (24)

Bernie trounced Hillary here in 2016, but this was also a caucus back then, and, as I have noted before, the abominations known as caucuses heavily favor Sanders by their nature, amplifying dramatically the voice of the passionate over pragmatic, colder voters; now, Maine has a more fair primary.  Bernie was way ahead in the polls here, but that was with Bloomberg doing well and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg doing well, too.  With Bloomberg fading and Pete and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar—both moderates clogging up Biden’s moderate lane—both dropping out and endorsing Biden, Biden might actually be competitive here.  Sanders should be favored but don’t count Biden out here, especially with Sen. Elizabeth Warren from nearby Massachusetts (perhaps now strategically, in a self-sacrificing way) clogging up Bernie’s “progressive” lane and Bernie’s polling average being under 30% even in the lead.  I imagine Warren’s staying power will be far larger here and in other states relative to Bloomberg, but if Bloomberg does well (which I am doubting), expect Bernie to win here.

Ostensibly great for Bernie, but Joe could surprise

Utah (29)

Sanders demolished Clinton here in 2016, but this was also a caucus, so, as with other caucus states that are now holding primaries, expect his numbers to be closer to earth.  There are only a couple of polls here, so the picture is murky, with Sanders generally having a healthy lead but not breaking 30%.  With a now-mostly consolidated moderate wing backing Biden, this state could go either way, even though Bernie seems to be favored by analysts, but I would bet a lot of that has to do with the 2016 vote.  Biden is much more open about his religious faith than Clinton was, so the deeply religious Mormons may appreciate this about Biden over the more secularized Sanders.

Toss-up

Arkansas (31)

Only a few polls have been out for Arkansas, but they showed way more people supporting moderate candidates and Bernie was not high on the list.  Bernie does not do well with Southern whites, and this is the state the Clintons led for years, so, along with having a sizable black population, this is not fertile ground for Bernie and Biden should do very well here.  Sanders, on the other hand, was clobbered here by Clinton in 2016.

Biden is a very clear favorite

Oklahoma (37)

Only a few recent polls had Biden and Bloomberg doing well, Sanders not so much.  With Bloomberg fading quickly, Biden should take from him in addition to adding support from other candidates who just left the race.  It is also a pretty white state (favoring Sanders), but is, more specifically, Southern white (which has not worked for Sanders).  Sanders might do better here than other Southern states, but that is a pretty low bar.  Yet Sanders did beat Clinton by 10 points, so don’t be shocked if he pulls off an “upset” based on limited data, especially if Bloomberg does well (though I doubt that will happen); it could be close.

Clear edge Biden, but don’t count Bernie out with so little data

Alabama (52)

This state has a very large African-American population, and, notably, Sanders skipped the 55^th anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday this weekend, the only major candidate not to attend, which could hurt him with black voters even more, especially in this state, at a time when he desperately needs to make inroads with that community; skipping Selma this weekend is just one of many tone-deaf moves by Sanders throughout his career (hello Fidel!).  Clinton demolished Sanders here in 2016 and this year’s result does not look to be much different for Sanders.

Huge win for Biden here

Tennessee (64)

Clinton dominated Sanders here, and with a sizable African-American population, it is hard to see Sanders winning this time around, either.  Though some late polling had him close, with the moderates consolidating, Biden should win comfortably, even with bad weather and a tornado hitting Nashville last night perhaps depressing turnout.

Pretty big win for Biden

Colorado (67)

Bernie trounced Hillary here in 2016, but, here again, we have a state that abandoned caucuses in 2016 for a primary in 2020.  Yes, it’s a pretty white state Bernie did well in but, once again, Bernie is polling here on average under 30% (far below his support in 2016) and moderate consolidation makes this race competitive, as it’s hard to see where a massive increase in support would come for Bernie with the moderates consolidating.  If Bloomberg doesn’t tank, Bernie has a much better chance, but I seem Bloomberg tanking.

Toss-up

Minnesota (75)

Sanders handily beat Clinton here, but back then, the state had caucuses and now it is a primary.  He was basically tied in polling with Klobuchar here, but with her dropping out along with Buttigieg and both endorsing Biden, Biden will be competitive.  But since Klobuchar’s tying with Bernie is likely more because of her being a local than ideology, perhaps a decent amount of her supporters go left and buck her endorsement of Biden.  Don’t count Joe out but definitely an edge for Bernie.

Close but edge to Bernie

Massachusetts (91)

Bernie and Warren are neck-and-neck here, but Biden should finish well, too, with all that moderate consolidation.  And yet, Massachusetts is, literally, the most liberal state in the country according to Gallup (with Bernie’s neighboring Vermont being the third most-liberal) so you would think Bernie would be doing better here… Still, I suspect that, in fact, because of moderates consolidating, a number of Warren voters will shift to Bernie for strategic reasons.  Warren was even less popular than her home state’s Republican governor in the 2018 elections so favoring her here does not seem like the better bet.

Edge to Bernie with Biden having a decent third place

Virginia (99)

With Northern Virginia being the government and politics crowd, Biden in a known and respected pillar of DC, and I have it from an impeccable inside source that absentee voting in Arlington, VA, is twice as high as in 2016, with more absentee votes still being counted, and that’s solid Biden country.  The state also has a loyal and sizable African-American constituency that even stuck by Gov. Ralph Northam through his blackface scandal. Biden should win big, especially with Bloomberg fading and moderate consolidation.

Big win for Biden

North Carolina (110)

With a large African American population and great recent polling for Biden, for many of the reasons he will do well in other states, expect Biden to win big here in North Carolina.  Not any good signs for Bernie, unless you think Bloomberg will be competitive, which I don’t.

Huge win for Biden

Texas (228)

This is the third-largest delegate haul in the country, only behind California and New York.  Results from Nevada suggest that Bernie is dominant with Hispanic voters, and, until recently, the most recent polls had Bernie with a decent lead.  But few pundits have pointed out how the caucus system there may very well have overrepresented his support with Latinos (normally difficult to poll), just as they overrepresent Sanders’s support in general, as was clearly the case with African-Americans (28% for Bernie in Nevada versus a more representative 17% in South Carolina), and I suspect this will be the case with Latinos; while it does seems Sanders has made solid inroads with Latinos since Hillary Clinton dominated him with them in 2016, the Texas primary will be the first real test of this.  If I am correct and his edge with Latinos shrinks or even disappears in Texas (and other primary states), Biden should win Texas (even if Sanders does better than Biden with Latinos, expect serious support for Biden from them, too.  And while Latinos are a huge minority in Texas, there is a solid African-American minority of about 11% of the state’s population there (and a much larger portion of the state’s Democratic primary electorate).  And with Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and former Texas U.S.-Representative-and-Senate-and-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke all endorsing Biden yesterday in Texas, Biden’s numbers will exceed his polling.  Hillary trounced Bernie in 2016 here, and with dynamics the way they are, it’s looking good for Biden, too, even if it may be fairly close.

Biden should win here, though the margin could range from slight to solid

California (415)

By far, the biggest prize in the nomination calendar has, until recently, looked to be decidedly pro-Bernie.  But with recent events, his recent dominant polling is deceptive, and a few late polls are already showing a Biden surge, which I thought was likely after South Carolina and especially likely after the Buttigieg endorsement, let alone the Klobuchar one; these surges in a few recent polls are data-points in favor of a much closer race in California.  Hillary won comfortably in 2016, and Biden has a real chance of catching Sanders.  Still, Sanders should be considered a favorite, especially considering how California is a state that has had massive amounts of early voting for some time during Sanders’s earlier peak, and Biden’s nadir, after New Hampshire and Nevada.  Still, those expecting a Bernie blowout of Biden are likely to be disappointed.  As I noted in my last piece, who gets the nomination would come down to California: if Bernie could blow out his competition there, it would be hard to catch him if he got nearly all its 415 delegates.  But, with Biden looking a lot closer and even having a shot at winning, it seems at best Bernie’s delegate lead there will be solid but not huge even as he is crushed in other key states in the South on Tuesday.  If early voting was less intense, it would look even better for Biden, but if Bernie wins by a more-than-modest margin, early voting will likely be the determining factor in that larger margin.  Bernie should win, but probably not by a ton, and Biden has a real probability of surprising, but especially with early voting happening in force expect Bernie to at least eke it out but probably do better than eke.  In the end, a good chunk of delegates should still go Biden’s way here either way.

Bernie should win, but not with the decisive win he needs, yet don’t count Biden out, either

Conclusion: Great News for Biden and Democrats, Bad News for Bernie and Trump

I was vainly trying to get this out last night, where I had the same overall feelings about how these races today would go, but new polling out this morning has only confirmed what my instincts were telling me as soon as Pete bowed out: Biden’s got this.

Looking at just about any state poll that came out before the last few days, you can add at least 10 points to Biden’s numbers, give-or-take, factoring in the Buttigieg and Klobuchar endorsements and that those endorsement will intensify an already increasing Bloomberg defection.  If you don’t believe me, Pete was averaging 10%, Amy 5%, in national polls as late as March 1^st, with Bloomberg at 15%.  That’s 30% combined, so don’t be surprised if Biden can even add 15-20% in numerous places to his numbers from March 1^st (10% is more conservative and I’m covering my ass to allow for early voting and human stubbornness, but it’s hardly unrealistic to think that one-half to two-thirds [or more!] of that bloc of support defect[s] to Biden on Super Tuesday votes cast today).  Add to all that the fact that there are serious percentages of undecided voters that will likely break for Biden as in South Carolina, and I expect Biden to do WAY better than his polling until just the last couple of days.

A few key points:

1. Bernie’s large edge with Latinos from Nevada will likely not translate to that degree since caucuses are not representative of larger voting populations
2. Biden should get a large portion of the (especially) Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and (even) Bloomberg support (even with him still in the race)
3. Undecideds should break heavily for Biden
4. California was Bernie’s one chance to run away with it in the delegate race and it is pretty clear that is quite unlikely now
5. Biden will crush Bernie overall in the South, making up for any difference in delegates between him and Bernie in California
6. States where Bernie will/could do his best are far smaller in delegate-count than the ones where Biden will do his best
7. Final Point: Biden should dominate Super Tuesday and should be on a clear path to the nomination after today

Thus, it very likely seems Bernie has already peaked and peaked early, just like in 2016.  His inability to win over African-American voters or less liberal whites means he, once again, was fairly doomed from the start if the moderate lane consolidated enough in time, which is exactly what happened this weekend.  There will be no revolution, and a nominee toxic to so many moderate and independent voters will not hand Trump an easy victory.  I’m already hearing anecdotally that more than a few people who voted Trump in 2016 will vote for Biden in 2020.

Thanks goodness for practical African-American voters, rescuing the left from itself two election cycles in a row.

I know I made a bold claim here as to the quality of my predictions, but my predictions in the 2016 cycle—from recognizing Trump as a threat way back in August, 2015, to seeing the Russian threat in July, 2016, from noting Clinton was obviously going to be the nominee after Nevada and Trump after South Carolina, to seeing how much of a threat Bernie Sanders and his supporters were as far as damaging Clinton, and in seeing Clinton as more vulnerable in the general election against Trump—proved to be far more prescient than most.

After tomorrow, the Democratic Party will very likely have fended-off an extremist hostile takeover and can present a sane, rational alternative to Trump that will not terrify many and will have broad appeal that can cut into Trump’s coalition.  There will be no risky revolution, but we have a shot to build on solid progress from the Obama years and other previous Democratic presidents, and, more importantly, a far better chance to stop a literal madman named Donald Trump—one with overtly fascist tendencies and operating extraconstitutionally—from destroying the American republic.  Exhale…

See my related article from before the South Carolina primary where I laid out the above scenario: Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006. He is currently in no way professionally affiliated with the Biden 2020 campaign, nor is receiving any compensation from it nor the Democratic Party nor any related super-PACs, campaigns, or other political groups involved in the 2020 nominating contests and elections.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  February 26, 2020 (title modified to include Putin/Bernie angle March 30, 2020)

WASHINGTON — As the wounded, screeching animal that is the collective of the Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls and, indeed, the Democratic Party itself, limps forward after the Nevada caucuses, I am filled both with a deep sense of dread but also have reasons for reasonable hope.

The Bad and the Ugly

First, the dread.

One almost has to admire the near-total lack of self-awareness of Bernie Sanders and so many of his followers.  Yes, countries are unique, but they do not exist in a vacuum, and as they march confidently forward, Bernie and his followers act as if they are not at all aware of the some fairly overwhelming global trends that are affecting Western democracies in particular but hardly Western Democracies alone.

The most prominent example is just from a few months ago, when a blithely confident Labour Party chief Jeremy Corbyn and his army of young and diverse Corbynistas were happy to condescend to all those questioning them as bad-faith, corrupted actors and never really prepared any serious answers to the valid concerns of those not on board as they sought to foist an ideology and scale and pace of change most Britons were nowhere near ready to accept.  The result was the worst electoral show for Britain’s Labour Party since 1935.  More than the following cases, the case of Corbyn and Labour in the UK should be a warning to Democrats, just as Brexit should have been a warning for Trump’s prospects in 2016, as I cautioned at the time.

Still, there are many more cases to consider.  We can look to Israel’s politics over the past two decades, which has seen its once mighty Labor Party fall to near political irrelevance, the same journey of the overall Israeli left.  Now, Israel is just days away from a third election this cycle in which, it seems, Israel’s left will be yet again be part of a failed effort to oust a rightist coalition.

The long-powerful French Socialist Party has likewise seen a crushing of its power recently.  In fact, all across Europe and beyond in places like Brazil, once popular leftist parties in democracies have crumbled and the far-right has risen.  While there are certainly some brighter spots for leftists electorally of late (e.g., Mexico, Canada), this collapse is stark and widespread, and not unrelated to Trump’s rise and current American political dynamics.  The collapse is also accompanied by a collapse of long-standing societal institutions—or at least a collapse in the public’s confidence in them—everything from government and organized religion to journalism and marriage to political parties and financial entities, even our faith in each other.  Such things had been stable for some time (sometimes a very long time), but in many ways now, we live in an era of dangerous declines in the very fabrics of society (in such a context, it is understanding, though still disturbing, that so many people have fallen on nationalism, ethnic identity, and/or fundamentalist religion).

It is within these contexts that Sanders’s would-be Sandernista revolutionaries have approached a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.  And let us make it clear that we are talking about a hostile takeover: in 2016, Sanders only won about one-third of registered Democrats running against Clinton, who was the preference of about two-thirds of registered Democrats.  The reverse was the case for their performance among independents who voted in the primaries and caucuses.

Again with the lack of self-awareness, they seem not to know in what “good” company they traverse.  For there is a massive international campaign—the primary mover behind which is none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin, including Russian military forces and intelligence—designed to destroy democracy by destroying the political center (including the center-right and center-left) throughout the Western democracies, particularly the United States and within the EU.  This is not by just attacking mainstream political parties, but by boosting many far-right and far-left parties and candidates as well as secessionist movements (Brexit, California, Texas, Catalonia, Scotland, and Ukraine are among the most prominent).  The idea with the former is to help far-right ethno-nationalist parties (espousing politics similar to Putin’s own nationalist brand inside Russia) take power; in this context, boosting the far-left parties, which are almost universally unviable today, serves to weaken the center in the face of the far-right. With the latter secessionism, the idea is to literally break apart key European nations and alliances, destabilizing Europe and weakening its unity and that of NATO in the face of a Kremlin eager to expand its influence on the continent.  Especially with Trump’s anti-European and anti-NATO views—whereby the U.S. before Trump had been Europe’s biggest supporter against Russia—Putin’s support of him and others is helping to systematically weaken the post-WWII system set up by the U.S. that has brought about the greatest level of peace and prosperity in Europe since the height of the pax-Romana over one-and-a-half millennia ago.  This war on the political center contributes to a goal long-held by Putin: an overall global decline in democracy and the rule of law, happening right now to his delight.  And neither Bernie, nor his people, never, ever seem to stop to ask how things they say and do are advancing Putin’s exact agenda in their own quest to destroy the center.

So, basically, the world does not revolve around Bernie Sanders at all for the Kremlin, he is just one of many far-left “useful idiot” candidates the Kremlin favors not at all as an end, but as a means to a destabilizing end, whether in 2016 or now, as was just revelated to little surprise to those who have been following (Jill Stein is simply another, just less prominent, example).  Unlike Trump, with Sanders I do not believe that he solicits or accepts such interference (though, quite unhelpfully, he seems to be blaming the media for making a big deal of this when this is a serious issue, and he did, rather astounding and infuriatingly, also seem to blame Russia for the Bernie bro phenomenon; sure the Russians amplify, but Bernie bros are real).

What is even more remarkable is that nearly all of his supporters with whom I have interacted with online or in-person are “useful idiots” for the Kremlin, a term popularly attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Lenin himself used to describe those who unwittingly propagate Kremlin propaganda because, simply, the believe in it.  These Bernie people basically dismiss the idea that Russia is boosting Bernie as “fake news” in spite of the detailed evidence for this (and much in the way Trump and Republicans do along with the Kremlin itself).  They deny it in spite of the obvious reality that a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, is an apologist for Fidel Castro and the 1979 Iranian hostage-takers, who broadcast Sandinista propaganda as mayor of Burlington, and seems to hate capitalism has close to zero chance of being elected president of a conservative, capitalist country with Electoral College and gerrymandered congressional voting district systems that strongly favor conservatives, that the Kremlin clearly wants Bernie to run against Trump so Putin can keep his favorite useful idiot in office.

These Bernie Supporters (I know these are not all of them, but still do represent a big chunk) do not like anything that does not fit the narrative that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are entirely to blame for the 2016 loss to Trump, so they are also usually all-too-quick to dismiss the clear reality that Russia interfered in 2016 at all to help Trump (journalistically, the incredibly selective, irritatingly myopic, and downright nasty Glenn Greenwald and his fellow Intercept folks Jeremy Scahill and Aaron Maté also fall into this useful idiot category).  They could care less about their role in the wider world or even the country: all that matters is their agenda and their crusade to see the center-left be obliterated by the Bernie left, they are not willing to even entertain the idea that they should adapt to add a larger spectrum of people to their camp, no, everyone else needs to join them and that is the only way they can see meaningful progress happening.  The very idea that they might do anything to appeal to people to their right, be they less liberal Democrats, independents, or even Republicans, offends then.  Sanders exudes this style from the top.

They do not care about the Democratic Party other than its utility to them as a vehicle to power; their aims are to hijack and destroy it from the inside out, not mold or remake, but to totally take it over and “bern” it down hence, they demand while offering no compromise.

And Sanders has practically won all three of first three states (technically two in terms of actual delegates so far but all three when looking at the popular vote in Iowa).  He is the overall leader in delegates and has all sorts of positive press coverage that comes along with winning.  He is the frontrunner by the main standards that count (delegates and votes), and his opposition for the nomination is fractured and far too numerous.  If Super Tuesday were held with the latest polls as the results, in many cases Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar would dilute the moderate vote so much so that Bernie would walk away with by far the most delegates and many of the moderates would be so weak individually they would not even receive any delegates (a candidate must get 15% statewide and in a state’s congressional districts to get any statewide or district-level delegates, respectively, and it is delegates that award the nomination).  A look at the current weighted polling averages in California, the state with the most delegates by far (415) at stake, makes how dire the situation of the non-Bernie Democrats is very clear:

So Bernie could be on a march to the nomination in what would be certain, barring some unforeseen calamity like an economic collapse orchestrated unwittingly by Trump, to hand Trump four more years in the White House, which could lead to the destruction of the American republic as we know it, as I have warned for years.

For this to sink in, ponder the actual distribution of political ideology in America:

Gallup has self-identified liberals at only 25%, while moderates are 35% and conservatives 37% of the population, and only six out of fifty states have more liberals than conservatives; Pew still has moderate and conservative democrats combined slightly outnumbering liberal Democrats in real life, though not in Twitter’s cesspool.

In other words, given the Electoral College and the fact that liberals are greatly outnumbered by moderates and conservative in general and even more so by states, it is truly madness to run Bernie Sanders in a national election.  Hypothetical polling should be ignored, as both Democrats and Republicans have avoided throwing the mountains of negative opposition research against Sanders because Democrats want to win over Sanders’ supporters and have Bernie play nice if they beat him, while Republicans want to see him do well against other Democrats so they can then fire point-blank at him during the general election, when they can see the whites of his eyes.

The signs so far are more or less that this will happen, that we are stuck with Bernie… until now.

The Good

For those Democrats reasonable, not myopic, and self-aware enough as to their relative strength and position in the overall Democratic and national electorate, and for other non-Democrats who dread Bernie as a choice against Trump, there are still reasons for hope.

1.) There are signs Bernie still is not winning many Democrats and his performance thus far gives ammunition to this idea

Looking at where contests have been held to far, it is important to note that the Iowa caucuses allowed same-day registration (meaning you did not need to be registered before you went to the caucuses), the New Hampshire primary was open (meaning you did not have to be a registered Democrat to vote in it), and the Nevada caucuses also allowed same-day registration.  In Iowa’s caucus entrance polls, only 20% of people identifying as Democrats were saying they were going to support Sanders.  In New Hampshire’s exit polls, only 26% of Democrats voted Sanders, and Democrats were only 52% of voters.  And in Nevada, only 30% of Democrats said they were supporting Sanders in entrance polls (and nearly one-fifth of voters were not Democrats).

The open quality of these contests, however, is not representative of the overall situation going forward, as a large chunk of upcoming contests have closed primaries in which only Democrats can participate, including New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania, the states with the second, fourth, and fifth most delegates up for grabs.  Most states also will not have same-day registration available, though a decent chunk will.  For Bernie supporters who are not loyal Democrats and disdain the party system, this means that unless they register early as Democrats in many places (a thought that would make a fair number of them sick), they cannot vote in the nomination contests.  Considering how at least 70% of Democrats in each of the first three states have not voted for Sanders, that is not a good sign for Team Bernie.

State registration deadlines

2.) From South Carolina forward, the overall territory of the contest is far less favorable to Bernie

Bernie does well and, in 2016, did well in three types of states: a.) states with open primaries, as noted above b.) very white states

Highest percent-white-alone states, 2019 U.S. Census data

and c.) caucus states (lots of overlap in b and c).  Sanders’ message in 2016 and his approach just did not resonate with voters of color, who overwhelmingly supported Clinton over Sanders; she easily won the most diverse states, which are also the most populous states.  So far this year (as before), the first two states were also two of the whitest: Iowa and New Hampshire are almost 91% and over 93% white, respectively, the sixth and eight-whitest states in the country (Bernie’s Vermont is the second-whitest state).

That gave Sanders quite a boost and hurt, say, Biden, going into Nevada.  But Iowa and Nevada are also caucuses, which are undemocratic abominations (as I have noted before) that, overall, dramatically depress turnout and favor certain privileged and enthusiastic groups over others and introduce social pressure by forcing caucus-goers to cast their votes publicly in front of their neighbors and force lobbying during the voting process.  The system is so chaotic, bad, and unrepresentative that in 2016 (besides this year’s obvious mishaps), when Washington State and Nebraska held non-binding primaries after the binding caucuses, Clinton beat Sanders in contests with dramatically higher turnout even though Sanders won the caucuses and, therefore, most of the delegates.  This year, mercifully, half the states with caucuses have already gone over to primaries, and only two states—North Dakota and Wyoming, tied for the least delegates of any state—and three U.S. territories are holding caucuses going forward, whereas fourteen states had caucuses in 2014 (twelve of which Bernie won by large margins and two of which Clinton won rather, and relatively, narrowly). Basically, in 2016, Bernie outperformed and dominated in caucus states.

In summary, this year the first two states were states with built-in advantages for Bernie, where he only won barely with the popular votes with about 26% support, and in Nevada, where he did far better, that was still a caucus state that inflated his support.

But Bernie will find South Carolina and the more populous Super Tuesday States a whole different ballgame, with far more diverse populations bestowing bountiful delegates in primaries.

3.) Dynamics are generally setting up to favor Biden and hurt Bernie and others

Apart from the aforementioned structural, geographic, and demographic reasons, other things are coming together to help elevate former Vice President Joe Biden and stall Sanders.

For one thing, apart from Sanders not having a terrible debate, everything else went about as well as Biden could have hoped for in the Nevada debate.  Biden easily had his best performance to date.  Yes, Sen. Elizabeth Warren stole the show, but she is competing mainly for other “progressive” voters with Sanders, not with Biden voters.  And she did Biden a huge favor by eviscerating the hapless former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has taken a lot of support from Biden within the moderate lane.  The other two moderates, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, tore into each other.  Warren also tore into each of them and even Bernie, and Pete went after Bloomberg, too.  Biden needed Klobuchar and Buttigieg and especially Bloomberg to take hits, and they did in dramatic fashion.  He needed Warren to do well to siphon off votes from Sanders and she performed better than anyone else.

In part as a result of these dynamics, Biden did far better in Nevada than in Iowa or New Hampshire, and though he came in far behind Sanders, he also came in far ahead of third-place Buttigieg in terms of delegates, with Klobuchar being shut out.  This was just what Biden needed going into South Carolina: a strong debate performance; a solid and clear second-place performance, a reminder of his relative potential strength compared to Buttigieg and Klobuchar in more diverse states; Warren hanging tough and keeping some “progressive” votes from going to Sanders; Bloomberg scaring the hell out of his supporters (some of the least committed in the race, along with Buttigieg’s voters) with that awful performance; and with businessman Tom Steyer—a virtual one-hit-wonder with high polling in South Carolina and nowhere else, except for some polls in Nevada but, encouragingly, he was a dud there—not even on stage, a reminder of his lack of a national profile.

Then came the South Carolina debate, in many ways a repeat of Nevada’s.  Bloomberg did not look as awful but still did not look good, and Warren was good but not as dominant.  Joe, though, had another of his best debates, the best one yet—a far more assertive and dominant Joe than we have seen—in which he was often the center of attention, and, helpful for Biden, everyone focused most of their fire on Sanders and kind of ignored Bloomberg for much of the debate.  Sanders was consistent as usual but also responded poorly and angrily—even to the audience!—when confronted.  For the most part Klobuchar and Buttigieg were fine but also non-factors other than solid attacks against Sanders, as was Steyer, who looked pretty bad when Biden brought up his $90 million investment into for-profit prisons.  This was an even more ideal debate, then, for Biden.

As if all this was not good enough for Biden’s chances, the legendary South Carolina politician, U.S. Rep. and House Majority Whip (the number-three Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives) James Clyburn, endorsed Biden today, the next morning.  This was expected but is still quite welcome, as Clyburn is a titan of South Carolina politics, where he fought for civil rights in the 1960s and was arrested and jailed for his efforts.  Clyburn is a revered figure for many African-Americans, elected to Congress in 1993 and selected for the number-three leadership position for House Democrats back in 2006, which he has held in both majority and minority roles since.

When Hillary Clinton got his endorsement in 2016, Clyburn helped her to exceed her polls and beat Sanders by an even far larger margin than Obama beat her in 2008.

So just about everything Biden could reasonably hope for (save for Steyer dropping out) has happened in the run-up to South Carolina.  If Biden win and wins convincingly there, some Democrats who have flocked to Bloomberg and Buttigieg (who are, relatively, uncommitted to them in polling) would easily flock back to a winning Biden. Buttigieg has no path going forward without any serious black support and the weaker Klobuchar even more so for the same reason has no path forward, and after they are very likely crushed in South Carolina, pressure on them to drop out will be overwhelming.  If they are not myopic or narcissistic, they will heed the call and back their fellow moderate Biden to prevent Sanders form having a high chance of piloting the Democratic Party like the Hindenburg.

Only three of fifty states have weighed in, and there are also the District of Columbia and various U.S. territories to vote, too.  A candidate needs to win 1,991 delegates to win the nomination on the first-round ballot at the convention, and Bernie Sanders so far has a whopping total of… forty-five, 2.2% of the total he needs.  Biden is just a mere thirty delegates behind, which is nothing, an easily surmountable lead that Biden has a decent chance to overtake in South Carolina.

Even if Biden does not become the frontrunner with a delegate lead immediately after South Carolina, in big Super Tuesday states, Biden is already polling well or ahead (though far lower with Bloomberg’s rise) even before the events in South Carolina impact those numbers.  Bernie is doing as well as he is in Super Tuesday polls in part because of Bloomberg’s previous surge chipping support away from Biden and Bernie’s Nevada bounce.  But Bloomberg is falling and, if Biden does well in South Carolina, we can expect his numbers to go up at the expense of Bloomberg and also Buttigieg and Klobuchar.  If one or more of them can be convinced to drop and out and endorse Biden before Super Tuesday—just three days after South Carolina, when over one-third of all pledged delegates will be awarded—that would go even farther.  On that day, two of the four states with over 200 pledged delegates up for grabs—California, with the most, and Texas, with the third-most, of all states—vote.

As in 2016, Bernie may have peaked in February in 2020.

The Moment of Truth for Non-Sanders Democrats Is Now

Until recently, Biden was ahead in most of the larger Super Tuesday votes and was competitive, as we saw above, in California, but Bernie built up a lead that could drown Biden out in California (again, if candidates do not get at least 15% statewide and in individual congressional districts, they do not get any delegates), however, this is at Bernie’s current peak.  And Biden is still neck-and-neck or ahead in Texas.

A strong South Carolina performance could seriously stop and reverse the gains Bernie has been making in these states, but it may come down to California: if too many other moderates take away enough support from Biden so that he is below 15% and gets no delegates out of the whopping 415 delegates at stake there, that could be an advantage for Bernie that might be very difficult, maybe even impossible, for Biden to overcome.  However, Bloomberg is doing tremendous damage to Biden there in current polling and in many of the larger states, and if he keeps fading, this prospect could be mitigated.  Conversely, in Florida, (voting later on March 17^th) Bernie is flirting with not being viable delegate-wise at all, so that, too, with that state’s fourth-largest delegate haul of 219 delegates, could offset to some degree a poor Biden showing in California.

But if Biden beats Sanders in Texas and take fare more delegates than him, combined, in other Super Tuesday states—something that would require Biden gaining a lot in California in the short time after South Carolina—then he would be the frontrunner.

I would argue this scenario is the hardly to be dismissed, and I would bet on him being viable there, given that Biden’s main competitors in the moderate lane have a good chance of continuing to fall or may even drop out after South Carolina, but it certainly is a serious possibility that they will not fall enough and Biden could be shutout in California.  If that scenario happens it will remain to be seen whether Biden or Bernie gets the nomination, and it will come down to a long fight over each remaining state, much like Clinton vs. Obama in 2008.  However, Biden will need the resources to compete and do respectably against Bernie in less populous, rural, and whiter states, and, currently, Sanders is way outpacing Biden in fundraising, yet, if other candidates give way to Biden, it is reasonable to think a lot more fundraising will come to Biden.  If Biden clearly outperforms Bernie on Super Tuesday, just like with Clinton, it would be hard to see Bernie overtaking Biden.

Still, rather than Bernie running away with it on Super Tuesday, South Carolina should significantly alter the dynamics of this race to give Biden a huge boost and pressure his moderate rivals to clear the way for Biden to take Bernie on mano a mano.  It is very likely that this boost will make Biden competitive for most of the rest of the nomination process, but the main question is if dynamics before Super Tuesday will boost Biden enough in California to be competitive and take a big chunk of delegates from there—which would almost surely make Biden the frontrunner—or if Bernie will dominate California to the degree of shutting or almost shutting Biden out of delegates, which could lead to a protracted, scorched-earth campaign and maybe, perhaps likely, a Bernie win.

However, Bernie Sanders being Bernie Sanders, even if Biden is the clear frontrunner, I fear, just like in 2016, Bernie and his Bernie bros will fight tooth and nail even when it is clear Bernie would not be the nominee.  Either way, the party will likely be torn apart, but apart from Bernie being the nominee and getting crushed by Trump—by far the most likely outcome with nominee Sanders—the worst outcome would be Bernie dominating in California but still losing to Biden in a very tight race, thus making Biden’s challenge of uniting the Democratic Party that much more difficult.  Still, if Biden can limit Bernie’s delegate advantage in California or even beat him there (the latter of which looks unlikely unless several people drop out), he should be a clear favorite to clear the 1,991-delegate threshold.

So I would say, roughly, there is probably a one-third chance that Biden will be a clear frontrunner, a one-third chance it could be pretty unclear until the end (I would still favor Biden then), and a one-third chance Bernie could get enough delegates on Super Tuesday, especially in California, that he would be a clear frontrunner.  But with so many x-factors—especially the behavior and performance of Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren (whom we have not discussed much, but her exit would help Sanders significantly)—in the mix, it is hard to narrow things down to one most likely scenario.  In contrast, in 2016, polling made it clear even after New Hampshire that Clinton was a heavy favorite in South Carolina and, as I noted at the time, Nevada was Bernie’s last chance to win over the type of non-white voters he needed before South Carolina and Super Tuesday to be viable going forward.  It was clear with her win in Nevada that Clinton would be the nominee and that Sanders had failed to dent Clinton’s formidable majority coalition.  But, since there are so many more candidates in this 2020 race, the outcome could remain in doubt for some time.

Democrats who want to win in November who are currently backing Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer need to realize that all they are doing is helping Sanders and to switch as quickly as possible to Biden.  In theory, with his fantastic ad campaign, Bloomberg could have been a viable alternative if Biden had continued to tank in Nevada and was more vulnerable in South Carolina.  Reality punctured that finely crafted image and possibility of Bloomberg’s with two far-from-good debate performances by Bloomberg.  If Biden had tanked, there would also have been a case for Buttigieg and Klobuchar remaining in the race, but with Biden poised for a clear South Carolina win, history will remember Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar for not getting out of the way and handing the nomination to Sanders if they persist in way that kneecaps Biden’s chances to overtake Sanders.  Sanders has a decent theoretical chance in South Carolina, but it seems very unlikely given the dynamics I have mentioned.

If there is one thing the anti-Sanders crowd can count on, it is the abilities of Sanders and his supporters to keep their high floor and low ceiling, sticking to their messianism, and doing little to nothing to win over those not already persuaded. Thus, Bernie will be easy to defeat if the moderate candidates consolidate quickly around Biden, but if Sanders is the nominee winning mostly 20-to-30-something % throughout, it will be because the other main non-Biden candidates could not put the country and the party before themselves even when it was clear they had virtually no chance to be the nominee, and it may be too late after Super Tuesday. At stake is not just the soul the Democratic Party, but the soul of the nation and its survival as a democratic republic.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 22, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981), September 11th-13th, 2018, and republished by Tuck Magazine September 24th; See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Sports

AMMAN — As I write this while watching the memorial service at Ground Zero with mourners reading the names of those they and others lost seventeen years ago today, as we remember the horrors of September 11th, 2001, and their aftermath, more and more, it looks like 9/11 can be seen as a turning point, one in which the world went from becoming less tribal to becoming more tribal, and not at all in a good way.

Hell, even tennis has just exploded into tribalism. TENNIS!! A spat between a (THE) tennis superstar and a stickler-of-an umpire became just like everything else: tribes gearing up for war, trying to gain ground in their culture wars consumed by vitriol and hate. TENNIS is now Trump vs. his many enemies, the left vs. the right, Sunni vs. Shiite, black vs. white, Hillary supporters vs. Bernie supporters, men vs. women, Israel vs. Palestine…

How did it get to this?

*****

As the millennium celebrations approached, the world could celebrate an era of increasing international peace, cooperation, and prosperity not seen since the Pax Romana some roughly two thousand years earlier.

Flikr/Paul Mannix

The Cold War had finally ended, and the two most powerful countries in the world had engaged in a massive reduction of their military forces, including their nuclear arsenals, as the great rivalry between Cold War superpowers the United State and the Soviet Union had melted away to a new if rocky friendship between the U.S. and Russia even as the U.S. extended friendship and alliances to many of Russia’s former Soviet republics and satellite states.

Europe was becoming more and more united politically, economically, militarily, as well as more democratic. Longtime enemies Jordan and Israel had finally signed a peace treaty, and a difficult but important peace process between Israelis and Palestinians had begun under the Oslo Accords. Even the U.S. and Vietnam were beginning a new chapter of friendship. Bitter rivalries in Asia had given way to increasing regional economic cooperation, and after a century of hatred, Japan and South Korea had agreed to host the 2002 FIFA World Cup together. Democracy and freedom were spreading in Latin America and Africa too, where apartheid had finally ended in South Africa and other nations were making important strides away from dictatorship.

This era of optimistic globalization would come to a screeching halt as planes slammed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. 

*****

It took a tremendous amount of `both hatred and willpower to plot to plan and fly those planes into their targets on September 11th, 2001. I’d love to say that, overall, we Americans responded with love to overcome the hate. We did, if ever so briefly, but that quickly gave way even more intense partisan rancor, two grossly mismanaged wars, and profligate spending along with a resurgence of all the awful trends that continued and spiraled out of control into what we have now. 

America became incredibly divided well before the 2004 presidential election; while the numbers were not dramatically different from 2000, the level of rancor and acrimony was. And America had just invaded Iraq in 2003, under deceptive and misguided if at least partially well-intention pretenses, and mismanaged the occupation in such an incompetent way that it ripped open the ethnic and sectarian divides in Iraq in a way that would, over time, raise tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, and Sunnis and other minorities like Christians, and this throughout the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq exacerbated, but by no means created, these divisions, and the damage would be considerable. For a brief window, the U.S. seemed like it would be able to shape events as it desired, but that dream faded away to reality as soon as an al-Qaeda truck bomb killed dozens and wounded far more at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including its all-star chief diplomat, the incomparable Sergio Vieira de Mello, that August; the UN pulled out soon after and Iraq, under hapless U.S. misleadership, descended in hell.

Yet the damage was hardly America acting by itself: particularly Syria and Iran—nervous about what American success in Iraq would mean for their regimes—were happy to let terrorists, insurgents, militiamen, other people and/or weapons enter Iraq by the thousands, caring little for the death and violence these actors and equipment would inflict upon the Iraqi people as long as they were undermining American interests there. This only further exacerbated tensions and problems already festering due to American incompetence to such a degree that Iraqi Shiites settled on an Iraqi Shiite strongman—Nuri Kamal al-Maliki—to feel safe, whose oppression of Sunnis was the largest single factor in the degree to which ISIS would experience success in Iraq. 

In a true case of chickens coming home to roost, ISIS—an offshoot of the breakaway former al-Qaeda group in Iraq that killed de Mello—added to the brutality of the Syrian Civil War, both directly in its own barbaric acts of mass murder and mass destruction but also indirectly in dragging less extreme factions closer to its brutality level and giving the regime of Bashar al-Assad and later its Russian allies all the excuse they would need to employ their own barbaric tactics against any and all resistance, pointing to ISIS and making little-to-no distinction between ISIS and Syrians simply fighting for their freedom.  The Syrian Civil War was itself one of a number of failures of the Arab Spring that have turned people against each other rather than uniting them, was already a horror-show of bloody sectarianism bringing out the worst in people all-around by the time ISIS had marched to the outskirts of Baghdad in mid-2014. 

Israel’s right-wing leaders, from the late Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu, likened their conflicts with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah incorrectly to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” just as Putin did with the Chechens, and prosecuted these conflicts with a ferocity that only empowered extremists in Hamas and Hezbollah (who do their part to empower extremity in Israeli politics) and has helped make the prospect for peace all but impossible for now, destroying Oslo and the peace process. 

The same increasing sectarianism and tribalism has led to a cruel callousness with which the Saudi-led coalition has prosecuted the war in Yemen and has created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in a half-century.

Just to look at a few other major locations: India is increasingly a hotbed of religious violence, China is engaged in the mass-cultural and religious destruction of its Uighur Muslim minority in its worst oppression since Mao, a genocide against the Muslim-minority Rohingya is happening in Burma, the South China Sea is becoming an increasingly nationalistically confrontational arena, and ethnic and/or religious tensions are driving forces reigniting wars in central Africa, from the Central African Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South Sudan.

While Americans were focused on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, including two wars overseas, the Bush Administration and Republicans rammed through a disastrous series of regulatory and economic moves that more than helped set the stage for the 2008 global financial crises. The hardships caused, intensified, and/or perpetuated by the near-collapse of the global financial system created and/or facilitated a state where masses of citizens globally were experiencing regression in their well-being, fostering much of the instability, political division, violent conflict, and rage at the status quo mentioned above.

As people looked for easy targets to blame, economic setbacks gave way to even greater racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious resentment; too many non-whites blamed white people in general for their ills in an unproductive way, painting with a broad brush and alienating possible white allies while energizing angry whites, while, even more importantly, whites laughably and ignorantly looked at racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as the roots of all their frustrations. Racial unrest exploded across America over the past few years, and white identity politics, more so than the economy, have brought us Brexit and Trump, though obviously there are relationships between the two. At this point, tribal secessionism in Europe is rising, in Spain with Catalonia and in the UK with Scotland (both having enthusiastic Russian support).

In hindsight, Brexit in 2014 was an obvious herald of Trump’s triumph in 2016 (both dramatically and in determining ways aided materially and abetted by the Russians). By 2016, poor whites in Appalachia and elsewhere were told to check their privilege, while nonwhites moving into the suburbs and in other communities were told to go back to where they came from. The resulting election (with the help of a massive, concerted state-sponsored Russian effort), was the most racially polarizing since the Civil Rights era a half-century earlier, a “whitelash” (to quote Van Jones from election night) of white nationalism that revealed the depths of American tribalism and made American politics in many ways as banal as those of the former the Soviet Republic of Georgia and many other places consumed by ethnic division.

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

*****

Since Trump’s win, the world has only plunger deeper into tribal division. The U.S. presidency—the single largest public media organ in global politics—has gone virtually silent on human rights, tolerance, respect for other cultures, and appreciation of diversity, with the consequences far transcending the verbal arena. This is a dramatic swing considering that human rights have been a major theme of U.S. foreign policy (even with all its shortcomings) for most of America’s modern history regardless of which party was in the White House. Concurrently, the forces on the other side of those stances have only too eagerly filled the void, and often with the help of Putin’s Kremlin.

As I noted not long ago, small-minded tribalism was a major factor in the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it is a major factor in the current unraveling of the West.

Regrettably, a tennis match is now—like everything else in the current cultural landscape—a frontline battle in a vicious global war of tribalism. This tremendous tribal tidal shift can be traced to 9/11, a tombstone not just for thousands of Americans and those who died in the ensuing misguided wars, but also for an era of humanity transcending petty differences. 9/11 is not just a time to mourn the dead, but what is to come, the petty creatures we have become, and the alternate world of lost opportunities: the what-might-have-beens if that glorious march forward—even with all its inconsistencies, bumps, and steps backwards—had continued without the slamming of planes into buildings and without the sad, counterproductive responses launched from what can be called, in hindsight, the ashes of hope.

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 6, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) June 6th, 2018 (based in part on an earlier piece published on October 29th, 2016: Comey Damages Clinton With Horribly Timed Weiner Speculation in Historic FBI Injection Into Election)

Michael Conroy/AP, Cliff Owen/AP

AMMAN — Former FBI Director James Comey might be more of an anti-Trump hero now, but that does not erase the stain of the spectacularly bad he showed throughout 2016 in his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail server probe. As Justice Department Inspector General Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigative report is about to be released, now is a good time to revisit these issues in a way that finally avoids the myopia of much of the previous discussion that nearly always missed or failed to give enough attention to the issues discussed below.

But first, a quick recap:

After Comey’s unprecedented disclosure eleven days before the election that potentially relevant e-mails may have been on Anthony Wiener’s laptop, two days before the election he let it be known that she was, again, in the clear. 

It was later revealed that Huma Abedin had only forwarded two e-mails to Weiner’s computer relevant to the investigation, duplicate e-mails with classified content that had already been reviewed by the and that ten other relevant e-mails with classified content had been automatically backed up to Wiener’s laptop, also duplicates that had previously been reviewed by the FBI. None of the e-mails were marked as classified.

All that was over just 12 duplicate e-mails. And by itself (hardly ignoring other major factors that could also be characterized the same way, not the least of which involve Russian cyberwarfare, racism, misogyny, and absolutely atrocious media coverage), this can be said to have cost Clinton the election.

*****

Beyond the above, there are deeper, neglected issues with how Comey looked at and framed core issues of the investigation throughout 2016, most notably how he characterized Clinton “extremely careless,” beginning in an extremely controversial (to say the least) 2016, press conference.

Now, before I continue, I want to stress that I still believe Comey was and is a straight shooter and public servant of honesty and integrity, and that it is clear many of Trump’s and Republicans’ attacks against Comey are absurd, disgusting, blatantly false, and hypocritical in the extreme; but all that does not mean Comey is infallible, and Comey was flat-out wrong and myopic in his famously characterizing Clinton and her team as “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information, mainly because of five things:

1.) Numbers

To delve into the topic of classification itself, there are the only three actual levels of classification: CONFIDENTIAL (the lowest), SECRET (the middle), and TOP SECRET (the highest). It has often been erroneously reported that SAP (Special Access Program) is a higher level of classification, but it is actually a special type of TOP SECRET or SECRET information, designed to give people who “need to know” that information access to it but not indicating a higher level of sensitivity within the classification level. These days, SAP often has to do with the U.S. drone program (more on that later).

In 2016, the FBI’s “July” report (released in early September by a clearly-exasperated-with-the-brouhaha-and-political-criticism-Comey) and information provided by the State Department detail how many e-mails had contained classified information at the time they were sent to or received by Clinton’s server: about 200 e-mails in 82 e-mail chains that passed through Clinton’s server out of about 47,000 e-mails were what was at issue in 2016. All but 13 of these chains were turned over by Clinton as part of 30,000 emails Clinton’s team had determined were work-related (most can be read here), and none of those other 13 e-mail chains—which were found among some additional 17,000 unique work and personal e-mails recovered by the FBI—were TOP SECRET.

Overall, of the 82 e-mail chains: 69 were still classified in 2016 (16 of which have been downgraded in their classification level), and 13 have been declassified, suggesting that at least those 16 and 13 are not involving anything particularly serious or particularly sensitive, even at the time.

8 chains were classified as TOP SECRET (7 of those, consisting of 22 e-mails total, were SAP), 37 chains were classified as SECRET, and 37 chains were classified as CONFIDENTIAL. 

So, out of over 47,000 e-mails under consideration, let’s remember that about 200, or about 0.425%, were deemed to have contained classified information at the time of sending and receiving and at least half or more were either the lowest level of classification or concerned publicly available information, and some of them were not even considered classified at all by Clinton’s own State Department. 

This means over 99.5% of the e-mails reviewed had no classification issues whatsoever.

No official in the history of the modern United States has ever so much of her communications material examined (or released so much to the public) so thoroughly and so soon after her time in office, and she used e-mail more than any of her predecessors because of the increasingly technological times in which we live. If most other senior government officials had an audit like Clinton’s it is safe to say that she would hardly stand alone in having less than 0.5% of her content containing some sort of classified information; some would very likely have more, given the problems with overclassification…

2.) Overclassification

The available reporting on the subject suggests that nearly all of the most sensitive TOP SECRET information (7 of 8 TOP SECRET chains) in the classified content that passed through Clinton’s server had to do with SAP-related, publicly available information on the drone program or other publicly available information about North Korea, which might be included in the 7 or could even be the 8th; the State Department did not consider the North Korean e-mail classified at the time, through at least one other agency did. In both cases, anything from an eyewitness account published by an NGO to a newspaper report about drones would be considered classified. This raises the issue of rampant & unnecessary overclassification  in the government, often more about interagency turf wars than national security, to the extent that prolific national security officials of both major political parties have publicly testified that “between 50% and 90% of all classified material could even be disclosed without any detrimental effect on national security.” Objectively, then, much and perhaps all of the information with the highest classification labels in Clinton’s e-mails were objectively not really sensitive or secret in nature. And it should also be noted that CONFIDENTIAL generally describes information that is so mundane and harmless that America’s intelligence chief in 2016, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, was considering a move to do away with the CONFIDENTIAL classification level entirely, noting that this is something the UK did recently in 2014 “without [adverse] impact.”

The only indications we have in terms of the content of the most sensitive material of the highest classification level is that it was publicly available information.

3.) Labels

Zero of these e-mails were properly marked as classified. All e-mails that are supposed to be classified are supposed to have clear, obvious headings and subject lines indicating that they contain classified information, but not one of the roughly 200 e-mails had anything indicating it contained classified information in any header or subject line. In fact, only 1 classified e-mail chain contained any classified markings whatsoever; this involved one or a few simple “portion mark” “(C)”(s) that preceded material that was specifically classified as and appeared in the body of the emails within the chain (two other e-mail chains had the same markings but the information in question in those chains was not actually classified and should not have been marked in the body with “(C)”s at all).

That’s right: only 1 e-mail chain with classified information had any classification markings, and it was not properly marked, with no headers and only the “(C)” indicator showing up buried in the body.

Practically no one ever reads every part of every work e-mail. Many people probably don’t fully read even a majority of their work e-mails, as so much content is sent and received and often people have to ignore much of the content and many e-mails entirely for the sake of time; still others will be ignored out of simple prioritizing or would even seen as a nuisance.

The idea that Clinton was careless and irresponsible because she a.) did not know that about 200 e-mails out of tens of thousands were classified but had no classified markings and b.) that she did not know that classified material was in 1 e-mail chain that had 1 or more little “(C)”s buried in e-mail bodies that any person skimming could easily miss is preposterous; in fact, it is possible she did not even read some of these e-mails in question or only read them in part, so considering this, holding her responsible for being aware of every detail of every e-mail sent to her has an added layer of ridiculousness.

None of the people involved were expert specialists on classification, and they and Secretary Clinton relied, as most non-classification-specialists would rely, on proper and clear headings to warn that classified information was at hand and that people sending them knew they were following proper procedure. That was clearly not the case here.

As Comey said during congressional testimony, the absence of the classification markings in all e-mail headers meant that it would be “a reasonable inference” to “immediately [conclude] that those three documents were not classified” even for an “expert at what’s classified and what’s not classified.” In fact, it seems it would be reasonable to assume, as Clinton did, that, in the absence of any other markings, such “(C)”s could at a glance seem to be a selection from an alphabetical list. This directly contradicts Comey’s assertion that Clinton was “extremely careless” with classified information.

4.) Sending vs. Receiving

The FBI report only mentions others sending Clinton material that was classified to begin these exchanges, not the other way around, suggesting that she may not have started any of the e-mail chains with classified material, essentially meaning that people were sending this information to her.

Returning to the issue of labels, taking into account that neither Clinton nor her people sent anything properly marked as classified on this e-mail system would actually mean that Clinton and her people were quite carefully trying not to send anything that was and that they knew was classified, contrary to the popular narrative and the conclusion of Comey, who even told Congress that there was no evidence to suggest that Clinton or her people were aware that any of the material passed through that server was classified.

5.) State Isn’t the FBI

Another important thing to note is that agencies often differ as to both what they classify and on levels of classification. Thus, something would still be considered classified even if the State Department did not feel it needed to be but another agency did, as happened with information in some of Clinton’s e-mails; to expect the head of one agency to be aware of other agencies’ classifications of information that that head’s agency did not feel the need to classify is, indeed, quite unreasonable.

The information we do have from the investigation shows that much of the material that was classified and passed on through unclassified e-mail channels was information that senior leaders needed to have to address pressing issues; thus, using standard secure terminals was impractical, impossible, or both, and skirting around that was the common practice under certain conditions.

The last point makes it clear that official procedures for the dissemination of classified information to senior officials when that information is needed in a timely manner are grossly inadequate and impractical to the extent that they are not followed so that important business may be done when it needs to be done. Comey would have to basically call the entire State Department extremely careless, for the classified content being improperly sent and improperly labeled was the product of unofficial but standard practice before Clinton’s tenure, and though he did note that the State Department was “generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government;” that seems to be decidedly less harsh language (“extremely careless”) than Comey used to describe Clinton’s similar (the same?) behavior, even though State overall was just as big a factor in creating the situation as Clinton, if not more so.

Comey’s viewpoint as an FBI man failed to give proper weight to or understand the unique challenges and responsibilities of a global and very fluid State Department and the distinct culture it has in terms of handling classified information as a result of all that and why this unique approach is necessary. The FBI uses and handles classified information in ways that differ greatly from the State Department, and, if anything, it seems Comey imposed the FBI’s standard on Clinton and the State Department, without considering that the different approaches at State were longstanding necessary workarounds for a problematic system that was a particularly bad fit for the State Department.

*****

Conclusion: Clinton & Co. Were Careful, Comey Was Careless in His Characterization

Taking into account the aforementioned five points, at least as much an issue as Comey’s July press conference and his handling of what went down late in October and early November 2016 was his understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the whole Clinton e-mail saga.

In the end, no evidence existed that any sensitive information was given to the wrong people or enemies of America or that America’s national security was compromised in any way by Clinton’s use of a private server or the fact that some classified material passed through it. This was less by luck and more because Clinton and her people actually were careful with how they handled the information as they understood it and could have been expected to have understood it in the condition they received it.

If anything, the focus on Clinton herself has been a distraction from the real problem at hand: the lack of reform of a system that few seem to have confidence in or respect for under certain important conditions, a system that is outdated and not taking into account more rapid forms of information dissemination that are common in the twenty-first century and necessary for modern diplomacy. But that has been lost in the conversation. And that itself is a true scandal, one which Comey’s report would have addressed had he been more careful.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg in an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. The views expressed here necessarily represent only his own, not necessarily the views of any organization with which he has been, or is currently, associated. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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